Good Monday morning. Following a rough Friday, following the stronger than expected December jobs report, futures are lower again this morning as 10-year yields hit their highest levels since October 2023. As we covered on Wednesday of last week (and as seen below), on a yield basis the 10-year is also hitting our most over overbought levels on the VRA Investing System, AKA when bad things tend to happen (meaning in this case when yields should soon begin to reverse lower).

We’ve seen this movie of “rising rates" before. This may well be a preview of the Federal Reserve vs Trump, as we saw play out in Trumps first term and most specifically in 2018, as the Fed hiked rates 7 straight times (by the end of 2018). What caught everyone’s attention was that the Fed wasn’t hiking because of hot inflation data or because the economy was running too hot, but because Trump, J Powell and the Fed essentially had a public grudge match. As you’ll probably remember, Trump went after Powell (al...