Thursday’s bond market has opened in negative territory, continuing its recent see-saw pattern of up one day, down another. The stock markets are currently showing losses with the Dow down 30 points and the Nasdaq down 2 points. The bond market is currently down 7/32, which will likely push this morning’s mortgage rates higher by approximately .125 of a disco unt point.

The only data released this morning brings weekly unemployment claims by the Labor Department. They reported that new claims fell to 299,000 last week, which was lower than expected. This could be taken as bad news for bonds, but it is only a week’s worth of data and has not had much of an impact on trading today.

The Labor Department will post March’s Employment report early tomorrow, giving us the U.S. unemployment rate and the number of jobs added or lost. This is an extremely important report to the financial and mortgage markets. It is expected to show no change in the unemployment rate of 4.8% and approximately 190,000 jobs added to the economy during the month. The ideal scenario for the bond market and mortgage rates would be an increase in the unemployment rate and a smaller than expected number of new jobs.

There is little doubt that this report will cause a fair amount of volatility in the financial and mortgage markets. Accordingly, please proceed carefully if you have not locked an interest rate yet.