Considering 10yr auctions and FOMC Minutes typically happen on Wednesdays, it's not uncommon for them to be sharing the stage.  In today's case, they were the only relevant items on the schedule.  While they certainly caused a bit of near term volatility, not only did that volatility play out on a micro scale, but it also carried trading levels back toward 'unchanged' by the end of the day. 

In their defense, both of these key players did as little as possible to be interesting.  The 10yr auction was right down the middle in terms of the awarded yield, bid-to-cover, and foreign participation.  The Fed Minutes similarly offered no surprises with some members still favoring an earlier rate hike and others still favoring late 2015 or even 2016. 

Markets were consequently left to draw their own conclusions about the lack of evolution in Fed thinking.  As we discussed this morning, the dialogue for these Minutes occurred in a world where the most recent Jobs report didn't happen. 

True, the Fed isn't known for letting one employment report materially change their stance, but if they're saying they're just looking for a bit more improvement in employment, and if we know the next employment report that informs their big picture assessment is an incredibly negative one, we can at the very least conclude that they will NOT have seen that improvement yet.  That feels like it should be a net-positive for bonds, and trading levels seemed to agree this afternoon.