Treasuries Close Nearly Flat Following Choppy Trading Day

(RTTNews) - After moving sharply lower over the course of the previous session, stocks showed a lack of direction throughout the trading day on Wednesday.

Bond prices lingered near the unchanged line for much for the session before closing roughly flat. As a result, the yield on the benchmark ten-year note, which moves opposite of its price, edged down by less than a basis point to 2.712 percent.

The choppy trading on the day came as traders seemed reluctant to make any significant moves ahead of the release of a slew of economic data in the next two days.

Traders will be flooded with data on Thursday, including reports on weekly jobless claims, industrial production, and regional manufacturing activity in the New York and Philadelphia areas.

Reports on consumer price inflation and homebuilder confidence may also attract some attention, although the volume of data may lead to a confused reaction.

Ahead of tomorrow's stampede of data, traders largely shrugged off a report from the Labor Department showing that producer prices unexpectedly came in unchanged in the month of July.

The Labor Department said its producer price index was unchanged in July following a 0.8 percent increase in June. Economists had been expecting the index to increase by about 0.3 percent.

The core producer price index, which excludes food and energy prices, edged up by 0.1 percent in July after rising by 0.2 percent in the previous month. Core prices had been expected to show another 0.2 percent increase.

Paul Dales, Senior U.S. Economist at Capital Economics, said, "We doubt that July's soft producer prices figures will force the Fed to conclude that the recent downward trend in core price pressures is more than temporary."

Trading on Thursday is likely to be impacted by the slew of economic data and the interpretation of how it will impact the outlook for the Fed's asset purchase program.