Being Columbus Day, the stock market is open, but bond markets are shuttered for the Federal holiday. As we noted in today's Morning Lineup, to get a read on the moves in Treasuries we can resort to ETFs like the iShares 20+ Year Treasury ETF (TLT). The ETF has gotten pummeled over the past several months, but on the geopolitical news of the weekend, TLT is putting at least a small dent into recent losses. As of this writing, TLT is up 1.4% today which puts it on pace for the best day since August 23rd. Not only that, but if the gains hold throughout the rest of the day, it would be TLT's best Columbus Day since the ETF began trading 20 years ago. That follows last year's 1.55% Columbus Day decline for TLT which was the worst performance on the holiday since the ETF's inception.

Overall, TLT's performance on Columbus Day has historically seen mixed returns with an average decline of 6 bps on trading volume that has been well below average. Since its inception in 2002, volume in TLT has never been above its 200-DMA on Columbus Day, and in more than half of all years volume has been less than half of its daily average

For equities, the trend is similar. Since 2002, median Columbus Day volume has been 57% of the 200-DMA while the median daily gain on the day was eight basis points. There have also only been five years when volume was above average. One of those years was 2008 when the ETF surged 14.52% on beliefs that the worst of the financial crisis was in the rearview. To this day, Columbus Day 2008 remains the sixth-largest single-day gain in the S&P 500's entire history dating back nearly a century.

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