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Friday, March 6, 2015

Mortgage Bond Market Analysis - Big, Bad Day

The Good news is that it's Friday...the bad news is that if you didn't lock prior to today (and locking last week would have been best), your rate will be higher by about .125%.  For those who read my posts on a regular basis you know that the first week of the month has all of the important employment reports and today we got non-farm payrolls at 295K vs. expectations of...240K.  NFP crushed expectation and investors are selling off because of it.  The unemployment rate is at 5.5% vs. expectations of 5.6%.  Finally, average hourly earnings came in at .1% vs. expectations of .2%.

The NFP number is BIG and I think investors anticipated this which is why they have sold off all this week (except for a small blip up on Wednesday).  In total, the benchmark FNMA bond is down 98 basis points which is about .25% in rate.  My advice has always been to lock before these kind of reports because of things like this.  The chart looks like it's trending down which means we could see some more sell off throughout the day.




If you have a loan closing in the next 15 days, I would recommend locking now to avert any worse pricing.  The RSI is getting close to oversold but the danger is that the bias may change to where these (and higher) rates are expected.  For the short term, I expect more selling and the only things that will turn this trend around is some bad economic news which doesn't look likely, or some geopolitical events that send investors fleeing to the safety of bonds (vs. stocks).  The other thing that could help is if a stock market correction took place - experts have been calling for a 10-15% correction about 10-15% ago.  Corrections happen but it's anybody's guess as to when the next one will happen.  I think that it's possible rates could be a fair amount higher before it actually happens so if you're closing a loan in the near future, it probably won't help it all unless the correction comes VERY soon.

Please feel free to contact me if I can help with anything mortgage-related.  Make it a great day and a great weekend.

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