Yesterday morning, we suggested that markets might do something "sneaky" and make some sort of moderate movement seemingly tied to economic data when it's true nature would instead merely be a movement within a "broader range trade."  We were looking at the domestic economic data slated for yesterday morning as having the potential to do this.  Silly us...

While markets indeed made the "sneaky" move, it was instead tied to to European data and headlines.  By the time domestic data hit, the "broader range trade" had already mostly played out, and the rest of the day became a task of "holding ground."  The ground-holding, in turn, helps us narrow down the various candidates for the boundaries of the range trade.  We thought we might be on to something with the 'triangle' seen in this chart late yesterday:

Now with a few of the Asian trading hours out of the way, and with yesterday's trading not quite making it to the upper trend line, the price action ends up having lent itself quite well to this "triangular range trade into next week" pattern:

(you see what I did there? the big box is a zoomed in view of the little box so you can see how well behaved the technical trends were in the low volume Asian hours).

It's not incredibly likely that this triangle will hold up all the way until June 1st, but it doesn't matter at this point because the suggestion is the same: no one really wants to make any decisions about what will happen next until known unknowns become known knowns (NFP, FOMC, Greek Elections, Spanish Banks, we're looking at you guys!).  If the triangle is broken, the next move is to assess the next potential range boundary, which will very likely be a horizontal line around 1.80 with another one around 1.70.  

And if those are broken, we'll look for something else clever to discuss and overanalyze, but for today at least, we're not seeing the day's only piece of economic data (Consumer Sentiment at 9:55am) as being THE THING that will redefine the current state of affairs.  As far as consumer sentiment readings go, markets are more likely to react to Germany's GFK sentiment coming up in a few hours--NOT because it's more important than ours, but it occurs sooner in a shortened session (folks heading for exits ASAP today) and it's more European, which is very fashionable for market movers these days.