Treasuries Close Roughly Flat Following Choppy Trading Day

(RTTNews) - Treasuries ended Friday's trading nearly unchanged after showing a lack of direction throughout the trading session.

Bond prices spent the day bouncing back and forth across the unchanged line before closing slightly higher. Subsequently, the yield on the benchmark ten-year note, which moves opposite of its price, edged down by less than a basis point to 2.619 percent.

While the ten-year yield showed only a slight drop on the day, the decrease still pulled it down to a new one-month closing low.

The choppy trading among treasuries reflected some uncertainty about the near-term outlook for the bond market following the recent upward trend.

Meanwhile, traders largely shrugged off a report from the Labor Department showing that U.S. producer prices rose by much more than expected in the month of March.

The Labor Department said its producer price index for final demand advanced by 0.5 percent in March after edging down by 0.1 percent in February. Economists had been expecting the index to tick up by 0.1 percent.

Core producer prices, which exclude food and energy, also rose by 0.6 percent in March following a 0.2 percent drop in the previous month. Core prices had been expected to rise by 0.2 percent.

Reuters and the University of Michigan released a separate report showing a bigger than expected improvement in consumer sentiment in the month of April.

The report showed that the preliminary reading on the consumer sentiment index for April came in at 82.6 compared to the final March reading of 80.0. Economists had expected the index to inch up to 81.0.

With the bigger than expected increase, Reuters said the consumer sentiment index reached its highest level since last July.

Next week's trading may be impacted by the release of some key economic data, including reports on retail sales, consumer prices, housing starts, and industrial production.