Answer: When prices are better by half a point on the day with absolutely no volatility...
The half point improvement portion of the above answer is easy enough to understand with 4.5's being up 16 ticks at the moment. Volatility will be best demonstrated in the following chart by the incredibly tight range of movement between highs and lows. Keep in mind that this is just intraday volatility whereas the more conventional measurements are concerned with how far prices move (or might move) from previous levels. So although we are half a point up on the day, the gap between lows and highs is incredibly narrow since the initial reaction to GDP.
With 3pm Book Close behind and Friday afternoon set to "go out" in less than 2 hours, characteristic sideways action is to be excpected, especially at these levels. If anything, the lower volume could give us a few bpm pulse increase as price changes might be more exagerated near day's end, but sad as it is to report to your adrenal glands, the rest of today's action pretty much doesn't matter.
So bask in the well-deserved glow of a triumphant Friday rally that is in the process of BREAKING out of a long term triangle and has oh-so-nicely adhered to the week's primary trend channel (admittedly now pushing the upside!). We'll talk more about what it means for lock/float considerations in the closing commentary today. But advice from my previous commentary remains: as some of you get your improved rate sheets, assess how much of the love has been shared and that this is looking like the 3rd, almost 2nd highest close since Black Wednesday. Getting aggressive above PAR on 4.5's is a bold choice until we have something from the stock market it may never be willing to give us....
By the way, the red lines above do not represent the longer term weekly trend channel, just inserted to show the lack of volatility...
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