Loved the little head-fake lower a few seconds before the actual release -- same thing seemed to happen in October's employment report as well (in reverse).
thanks waggie and others -I just realized what happened- I had my quotes discontinued on esignal when I moved . I had the full cbot with my other vendor. However I thought esignal was faster so I went back to esignal ---but I did not order the full cbot.
I think the market was just too short, as you say. The figures were bullish, but not *that* bullish. Longer-term, I'd be looking for some point to short the 10 year. A good level would be just below the 4% yield level - that would be just above the previous months' highs, so would stop out weak shorts and encourage weak longs into the market. My rationale is very simple - rates will not stay at 1%, nor will Greenspan and Congress sit back whilst the dollar collapses indefinitely. The economy is doing fine. Inflation is showing up in commodities and will eventually hit the CPI. That's not an environment to own securities yielding a fixed 4 and a bit percent. Finally, the bond bull market was decisively broken in July, and the low made in August. Bear markets usually last longer than 2 months.
A better strategy would be to go long anytime the 10yr gets around 4.40%- 4.50%. Rates rising is just here-say at this point. Look at Japan, how long have rates been low there? Just a thought.
I would like to ask US Bond / Notes daytraders what charts, indicators and maybe other markets they follow to get the feel of the market. Volume is unusable at least until CBOT gets their act together (newest info is Jan-2004) with eCBOT (if you ask me, I think they do it on purpose...) Thanks, M
Maybe I'm missing something, but this seems to be the perfect way to have traded ZB yesterday. A stop limit above and below by 16/32nds would have done it nicely - it seems. Even if the fill slipped a few tick higher you would be in. I've seen this happen a couple of times but have not had the guts to try it. Has anyone actually executed this way? - rcm
yesterday ... I placed a limit order to go short 28 ticks higher than pre 8:30 am #'s and turned my page to look at mini gold futures with ZB 8 ticks lower than my price ... in a blink of an eye I was filled and the market was 12 ticks against me ... I decided to cover and take a few tick loss instead of praying for the market to come in it did eventually come in a little lover than my short price before ralling the rest of the day until very late <Maybe I'm missing something, but this seems to be the perfect way to have traded ZB yesterday. A stop limit above and below by 16/32nds would have done it nicely - it seems. Even if the fill slipped a few tick higher you would be in. I've seen this happen a couple of times but have not had the guts to try it. Has anyone actually executed this way? - rcm>
The market was expecting numbers that were THREE TIMES stronger than what came out. True, there was a mild upward revision from last month, AND you can say that the SAFEWAY GROCERY WORKERS STRIKE also accounted for another 26,000-31,000 workers. In any event, the Bond market was set-up technically ( just look at the Daily's ) for this move, and there are a lot of guys out there that are looking to sell the S&P and buy bonds as well. Should the S&P take a dive next week, the Bonds could surprise some people on the upside for a bit. Just think about this for a minute . . . Companies just got thru the third quarter which saw 8.2% GDP growth and they didn't have to really add anyone to the payrolls. . . So if 8.2% doesn't significantly add any job creation, then why would an employer even begin to have any kind of mindset other than "sitting on the sidelines" when he knows that the economy will most likely return to more milder growth like 4-5% over the next 2 quarters? Seems like there is still a lot of capacity around in the system. Just my 2 cents.
Big difference is that Japan's currency didn't go head first down the toilet to the tune of 45% in 18 months, plus they had a gigantic trade surplus. But if you think 1% rates will persist indefinitely and result in a low inflation environment, feel free to buy the bonds on dips. It takes two to make a market, and right now the price says you're more likely to be right than me. Sold you 1 T-note - let's see where it trades in 2 years time.