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(Bloomberg) — The rally that powered the US bond market toward its best year since 2020 has now left investors in suspense to see whether Treasuries can hold their impressive gains.

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US 10-year yields declined last week, sending the benchmark back toward 4% as spasms in stocks and crypto sparked demand for bonds. Fresh commentary from John Williams, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, added to the bid, reviving expectations for an interest-rate cut next month.

Heading into the Thanksgiving holiday-shortened week, the benchmark Bloomberg Treasuries index is on track for a small gain in November after rising in eight of the prior 10 months. And yet, while the tone is still generally upbeat, the market is mired below October’s price highs and yields are range-bound.

Absent a fresh bout of risk-off buying, and with no major economic data to speak of until after the Fed’s December meeting, that’s likely how things will stay for the foreseeable future, market watchers say.

“For a meaningful rally, the market is going to need some hard data,” said Kathy Jones, chief fixed-income strategist at Charles Schwab.

The $30 trillion US bond market has been confined to a trading band in recent weeks as a lack of clear signals on jobs and inflation — complicated in part by distortions from the recent government shutdown — divided Fed policymakers and made a third consecutive rate cut less of a sure thing.

“Certainly there’s no catalyst for the 10-year to go below 4% again,” said Kevin Flanagan, head of fixed income strategy at WisdomTree. Across the yield curve, Treasuries are “stuck in the mud,” he added.

The lack of conviction is showing up in a measure of bond market volatility. Market swings remain near historical lows after picking up from last month’s four-year low.

Official US employment data for September was finally released on Thursday, but it revealed a mixed picture that did little to settle the debate about the central bank’s likely path. On Friday, though, odds for a December cut climbed back near 65% after New York Fed President Williams said he sees room to lower interest rates in the near term as the labor market softens.

“A cut is more likely than not” in December, said Amar Reganti, fixed-income strategist at Hartford Funds. That said, he added, “inflation is above target and yes the labor market is weaker but that’s also a lagging indicator, so we don’t know how far it goes. You can make plausible arguments either way.”

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Making matters worse, the government scrapped reports on October jobs and consumer prices, owing to the shutdown. November figures won’t be released until after policymakers meet in mid-December.

Several Fed officials urged caution about additional cuts before Williams spoke. Fed Governor Michael Barr said the US central bank needs to proceed with caution in considering additional interest-rate cuts. Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee signaled that he’s still apprehensive about delivering another rate cut next month.

To be sure, zooming out, investors remain optimistic that the Fed will eventually lower rates over the next year to about 3% from just under 4% today, which would favor bonds. Net-long positions are holding near their highest level since April, according to the latest JPMorgan Chase survey, which came out before the release of the September employment report.

The lack of near-term data clarity, bond bulls say, merely delays, rather than derails, the Fed’s easing cycle as the labor market continues to cool. Traders are fully pricing in a quarter-point cut at the January meeting and 0.9 percentage points of easing over the next 12 months.

“If the Fed does not cut in December, we think it is likely they counterbalance that decision with a somewhat dovish message that leaves open the potential to reduce rates in January,” Deutsche Bank’s economists, including Matthew Luzzetti, wrote in a note. “In this way, December and January could be viewed somewhat interchangeably for the Committee at this point.”

What Bloomberg Strategists say …

“Yields have room to fall even without a rate cut in December, especially as Fed swaps reflect a certainty of a rate cut in January.”

— Alyce Andres, strategist, Markets Live

Read the full analysis here

A further selloff in equities could be a tailwind for bonds, prompting a flight to safety, according to Kelsey Berro, executive director for fixed income at JPMorgan Asset Management. The S&P 500 has fallen about 5% from its October peak amid concerns about a hawkish Fed and lofty valuations.

Otherwise, with no major catalyst on the immediate horizon, there’s scant incentive to go bold.

George Goncalves, head of US macro strategy at MUFG Securities Americas Inc said he expects a Fed cut next month and a small rally in Treasuries by year-end, with more gains for US bonds expected next year as the central bank continues its reduction cycle. But for now, the proximity of year-end makes it hard to have “enough conviction to put on trades that matter.”

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–With assistance from Carter Johnson and Edward Bolingbroke.

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Every influential scientist has an origin story — and the “Godmother of AI” is no different.

Fei-Fei Li, a Stanford professor best known for her work on ImageNet, is now the founder of World Labs, a one-year-old AI startup that’s already valued at over $1 billion.

Her start, however, was far more humble.

Li immigrated to the United States from China at the age of 15 and helped her parents run a dry-cleaning business in Parsippany, New Jersey, to make ends meet.

“We were not financially very well off at all. My parents were doing cashier jobs and I was doing Chinese restaurant jobs,” she told Bloomberg in a Q&A. “My family and I decided to run a little dry cleaner shop to make some money to survive.”

Li said she likes to joke that she was the “CEO.” She ran the shop for seven years, from when she was 18 until the middle of her graduate studies.

According to her LinkedIn profile, Li attended Princeton University for college, keeping her close to her parents’ shop. Later, while pursuing her Ph.D. at Caltech in California, she continued to run the business remotely.

“I was the one who spoke English. So I took all the customer phone calls, I dealt with the billing, the inspections, all the business,” she said.

The experience, she said, taught her the value of resilience — a principle that continues to guide her career.

“As a scientist, you have to be resilient because science is a non-linear journey. Nobody has all the solutions. You have to go through such a challenge to find an answer. And as an immigrant, you learn to be resilient,” she said.

At World Labs, Li has big ambitions. She is working on building world models. These are AI models that leverage spatial intelligence, which Li says is “the ability for AI to understand, perceive, reason and interact [with the world]. It comes from a continuation of visual intelligence.”

A growing number of AI experts believe that world models are what will propel the AI revolution into its next phase. Some believe large-language models, which are trained on, as the name suggests, lanaguage, and which the leading products are now based, are limited.

Li said ImageNet, a comprehensive training dataset of visual information, was a precursor to world models.

At the core of Li’s research is the idea that visual information, a passive way of understanding the world, is a crucial foundation for real-world action, which remains one of the ultimate goals of some top AI builders, like Meta Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun, who recently announced he would step down to launch his own world model startup.

The through-line between Li’s research and her immigrant story is the same.

“I was always a curious kid, and then my curiosity had an outlet, which was science — and that really grounded me,” she told Bloomberg. “I wasn’t curious about nightclubs or other things. I was an avid lover of science.”