Ahead of the FOMC minutes last week the market took a punt on hopes for a hawkish line or two in the FOMC minutes. It didn’t come. Are they trying again?

The themes today are US dollar strength, soft bonds and dramatic weakness in gold — that’s a cocktail of trades you’d make expecting Yellen to hint about a rate hike in mid-2015. Yellen delivers her Humphrey Hawkins testimony tomorrow along and the retail sales report will be released.

Traders have been burned on this angle before but it looks like the market wants to take another shot. My best guess on what we’ll hear from Yellen is something similar to what Lockhart said late on Friday (more here). That kind of rhetoric will leave the hawks disappointed again.