This morning's commentary invoked some figurative language evokes notions of seasonality (have you ever seen invoke and evoke used in the same sentence?! but I digress).  Even that early in the day, I had a sinking feeling that--although the sun had risen for bond markets during the first 3 days of the week--it might be setting today.

There was no crystal ball involved here--just a simple set of lines and some early morning momentum that suggested the following consolidation pattern might be getting more confirmation.

The nice thing about this consolidation pattern is that the setting of the sun doesn't necessarily connote a long and scary night.  Today alone was enough to traverse almost half the darkness.  Things wouldn't get too scary until/unless rates moved up and out of the this pattern.  I don't have a Hemingway allusion or other witty metaphors for that eventuality, but given that we're talking about sunsets and the night, something to do with 'bad dreams,' seems in order.  We'll cross that bridge if we come to it though.

For those of you interested in specific "cause-and-effect" type market movers today, you're mostly out of luck.  After all, the 30yr Treasury auction was fairly strong and bonds merely continued to sell-off.  The tried and true (and frequently incorrect) argument about stock gains hurting bonds is actually worth a try today.  It's true that stocks experienced a breakout that coincided with bonds bouncing.