Mortgage rates at standstill

Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2010
Written 9:30 a.m.

DOLDRUMS: Mortgage rates have hit a calm period. That's unusual in the Post-Meltdown Era. It's early in the day as I write this, but I don't see much movement in rates so far.

THE RTI: Bankrate has a popular standby called the Rate Trend Index, in which mortgage industry experts try to predict what will happen to rates in the next month or so. If you click on the above link to last week's RTI, you'll see that the voters were evenly split among those predicting higher rates and those predicting lower rates. About one-quarter of voters thought rates wouldn't be much different a month from now.

Dan Green, blogger extraordinaire and loan officer, tells me that he has tracked how the RTI voters have done collectively last year. I await the blog post in which he publishes the results. In the meantime, let me tell you about my personal track record.

In the 52 weeks from Dec. 10, 2008, to Dec. 2 last year, I correctly guessed the direction of mortgage rates 25 times, for a batting average of .481. I believe that's better than my long-term average. Let's see ...

OK, I started logging my track record in January 2002. I've guessed correctly 174 times in 412 weeks, for a batting average of .421.

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