Good Monday afternoon/evening, everyone. How was your long weekend? We hope it was good however you celebrated it, but it's time to get back in the saddle, so.... giddyup. Yields Roll Over, and That's a Good Thing I meant to do this a couple of weeks ago but just couldn't find time to squeeze it in. It worked out for the best though, because it didn't become relevant again until today. What I'm talking about is interest rates - where they are, and where they're going. The Federal Reserve caught some people off guard in mid-March by saying it was going to exercise some restraint with its more aggressive plans for rate hikes laid out in December of last year. We didn't immediately see any real evidence that the market believed what Janet Yellen was saying, but as of the past few days we can see traders are staring to believe it, and trade that way. The chart below tells the story. Yields on long-term bonds have finally started to roll over, and correspondingly, values on long-term bonds are starting to accelerate higher. The size, shape, and disposition of these reversals along with the backdrop of our economic situation all say yields are moving into a bigger downtrend, and bond prices are starting an uptrend. Yields are moving lower in tandem with the U.S. dollar. In fact, you could argue the U.S. Dollar Index is sinking because U.S. interest rates are falling... although the greenback has been weaker for longer than yields have. Take a look at the chart of the U.S. Dollar Index below. That's a downtrend. Granted, it's not a long-term downtrend yet, but all big trends start out as small ones. That said, this short-term downtrend form the dollar has a better chance at turning into a long-term downtrend that one might imagine. There's just one big support area left to break. I don't have room within the confines of this newsletter's columns to show you the full-screen chart of the U.S. Dollar Index, but here it is in full-screen view. In this timeframe you can see that the index is within reach of a minor support line at 95.74, and within sight of two major floors at 93.85 and 93.3... and taking aim at all of them. Folks, if the U.S. Dollar can just move under 93.30 and start a cascading selloff, that solves a lot of problems for a lot of people. Lower yields will help, but I've got a sneaking suspicion the dollar could move meaningfully lower even if rates don't tumble as well. We just need to see interest rates reasonably well contained. With that as the backdrop... The Fed is likely to do its part to contain said interest rates. Just to put the Federal Reserve's newer interest rate projections in perspective -- visually -- I want to show you the scatter-plot of the FOMC's Fed funds rate projections from December and then show you the updated version from the middle of March. The numbers are the weighted averages for each year's rate-outlook. That's a pretty drastic dial-back, made even more drastic by the market's certainty late last year and even early this year that the FOMC was going to be even more aggressive than its projections implied. It looks like the market is finally starting to correct its mistake. The Fed's voting members can be wrong, of course, and obviously change their mind as new data is received. But, I've got a funny feeling rates are going to linger on the low end of the scale for more than a little while longer. The shape of the falling yield chart says the same thing. That's ok though. The greenback needs the help. Earnings Previews Geez, is it really almost time to begin Q1's earnings season? Looks that way. In any case, the site's regular contributors have been and will continue to prep you for the market's more important earnings announcements. Two such previews were posted today. Peter Graham gave us a heads up on Lululemon's (LULU) numbers due before Wednesday's open. You may recall this company has been struggling to deal with a couple of embarrassing gaffes and a leadership transition. This is an important quarter, as it will either confirm or question the company's ability to move all the way past its hurdles. And, Bryan Murphy served up a preview of Friday's quarterly report from BlackBerry (BBRY). This company has been struggling too, as it works itself away from being a hardware company and redevelops itself as a software company. It's not going especially well. I really liked Murphy's visualizations, which tell the story with just a glance. Still Up in the Air My worst fears (so far) are coming true. That is, the market is simply stagnating, getting comfortable between major support and resistance levels. Underscoring this brewing stagnation is today's action. Not only was today's high-to-low range quite small, but the open as well as the close were basically in line with Thursday's close. Volume remained minimal. Take a look. The NASDAQ Composite doesn't look any better poised to make a trade-worthy move... in either direction. Ugh. Maybe this just a short-term respite for an overworked market. I hope that 's all this is. If not, April could be a long month. May and June are also usually minimal-movement months too. So now what do traders do? If the stock market isn't going to move, then you find the instruments that are moving. There are several of them, but the easiest ones to tap are gold and crude oil. I know for a lot of you that's uncharted water. I'm telling you though... it's worth it. If you need some help making sense of commodities, John Monroe over at the Elite Opportunity follows oil and gold just as much as he follows the stock market, and serves up trading ideas on oil and gold ETFs just as often as he has a trade on the broad market. In fact, he's got an open trade on one of them now, and is on the verge of initiating a trade on the other one. Don't sit idle for the next several weeks while stocks figure out when and where they want to get off the fence. Sign up for the Elite Opportunity service and find out where the trade-worthy trends are, and how to trade them. Here's how, or cut and paste this link: https://www.smallcapnetwork.com/pages/SCNEO/v1/