Treasury yields fell from multiyear highs on Thursday after rising to multiyear highs on Thursday. Groundbreaking stuff. Really cuts through the noise.
The headline says yields fell. The summary says yields were higher. Someone's lying or nobody knows what day it is. Both explanations track.
Investors kept selling government debt, which makes yields go up, except yields went down, which means investors bought government debt, except they didn't, they sold it. The financial press has mastered Schrödinger's bond market. Yields exist in superposition until a retail trader observes them and loses money in both states simultaneously.
Here's what happened: nothing. Bonds moved. They always move. Calling it news is like reporting that a heart beat or that gravity still works. But some poor bastard read this headline, then read the summary, then stared at his Robinhood account for eleven minutes trying to reconcile the contradiction before buying TLT calls and puts at the same time. He'll lose on both. That's not a prediction. That's geometry.
The technical picture is crystal clear. Yields went up then down or down then up depending on which sentence you read. The 10-year did a thing. Then it did a different thing. Probably did a third thing by the time this got published. None of it matters because bonds are the financial equivalent of watching paint dry except the paint is also on fire and somehow boring.
Multiyear highs lasted less than a day. Real durable stuff. The kind of resistance level you can set your watch to, assuming your watch runs on pure chaos and trader delusion. Somewhere a technical analyst drew a line on a chart and called it support. That line is now resistance. By tomorrow it'll be a gap fill. By next week it'll be a podcast episode about why he saw it coming.
The only thing that fell harder than Treasury yields was the reading comprehension of whoever wrote a headline that contradicts its own summary.
Photo by Maxim Hopman on Unsplash
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