There were no market movers in play today.  I'm not trying to be funny or clever.  There were no market movers--at least not in the traditional sense where something happens and markets respond due to the implications of the thing that happened.

There were only compulsory trades and byproducts of those trades.  These are like the forces of nature when it comes to bond markets.  Whereas last week's CPI data and Fed Announcement were like giant wind machines clearly responsible for the breeze we were feeling, today's hurricane grew and evolved from weather that was already set in motion.  In other words, nothing about today caused the sell-off other than today was when it happened.

We saw the first evidence of a "tradeflow-motivated" sell-off at 8:20am.  There were no headlines or compelling events at 8:20am--just the CME open (the unofficial opening bell for Treasuries).  When traders show up for work with certain trades to make, and when those trades happen to be similar to one another, we tend to see evidence of that at 8:20am both in the form of volume and directionality.  True to form, volume spiked at 8:20am, and bond market weakness kicked into higher gear.

From there, the rest of the day was largely dominated by the reaction to that initial momentum.  We call it a reaction, but other traders could have easily had similar trades to make by the end of the year and simply pulled them forward to today based on what they saw.  In some cases, it was simply a computer program seeing a trigger level for more selling.  At a certain point in a sell-off, negative momentum becomes self-sustaining as everyone whose bluff can be called is forced to sell to avoid further losses.  At that point, weakness tends to run up to the next big line in the sand.  

There could have been no better example of this than today's highs coming in around 2.47% because that's the only other major technical ceiling we've discussed apart from 2.42% since late October.  The fact that 2.47% was hit so perfectly today only adds to the notion that this sell-off wasn't answering to anything but itself.  Granted, this can be exceptionally frustrating to consider on a day where the tax bill passed (sort of... now it looks like it goes back for a re-vote due to a technicality).  After all, if we have this big movement and this big "thing" happening in the form of tax bill, surely the big thing is the motivation for the movement, right?

But the last minute revelation that the House would have to re-vote ended up serving as the perfect piece of evidence.  Here we thought the Senate was minutes away from sending the bill to the President's desk and suddenly the House will have to come back to work tomorrow and do it all again.  If the tax bill passage deserved any credit as a market mover today, you can bet we would have seen at least some small blip when that news hit.  But there was nothing.

Bottom line: markets traded taxes in grand fashion throughout 2017, and especially in the past 3 months.  There were days where the tax bill absolutely drove markets above all else.  Today was not one of those days.