Could Have Been Better. Could Have Been Worse

If the bond market was a Mario Bro, it found a gold star at some point on Wednesday. As Thursday afternoon, the gold star ran out of juice and we're back to regular old Mario. In other words, astonishing resilience/bullishness has been replaced by a sideways-to-slightly-weaker grind. It could be as simple as the desire among traders to consolidate recent gains without getting too carried away. Ongoing selling in tech stocks ostensibly allowed for another bond rally, so the fact that we lost a bit of ground could end up looking like an important clue about resistance. A mid-day spike in oil prices may have added just a bit of upward pressure in yields, but it's more likely correlation>causation as oil has been higher all week. Losses were minimal as of 3pm, leaving most of the week's rally intact.