The Treasury Department will sell $29 billion of 7-year notes at 1:00 p.m. ET today.



There is a chance this sale will be the strongest of three-offerings the Treasury Department put on the auction-block this week (compared to Tuesday's 2-year notes and yesterday's 5-year notes).



Portfolio managers who align their investment funds with benchmark indexes often have to make last-minute adjustments to the average maturity of their holdings at the end of each month. Seven-year notes are always the last Treasury notes sold at the end of the month, so they work as a quick fix for managers who need to do a little tweaking to their positions.



The Fed is also expected to be a buyer at today's auction - spending $5 to $10 billion of the roughly $300 billion they have left of their original "QE2" checking account balance ($600 billion in case you don't recall).



A well bid 7-year note auction would likely prove very supportive for the prospects of steady to perhaps fractionally lower mortgage interest - at least between today and the release of next week Friday's January nonfarm payroll figures.



In other news of the day, the Labor Department reported the number of Americans filing first-time claims for unemployment benefits rose by a surprising 51,000 during the week ended January 22nd. Mortgage investors largely shrugged this outsized gain off - reasoning that harsh weather conditions in some parts of the country kept workers at home and caused a backlog in the processing of claims from prior weeks. The latest jump in the initial weekly jobless claims number does not have any implications for next week's larger and more important nonfarm payroll report -- as this week's initial jobless claims data fell outside the more meaningful report's survey period.