Another Powell Fed Day

Sep 17, 2025

Fed Day is here! The FOMC concludes its meeting this afternoon and in all likelihood Powell and company will cut rates by 25 bps.  As we have highlighted in the past, when it comes to how stocks respond to the FOMC, Powell Fed Days have on average been the worst of any Fed Chair.  By the close of trading, the S&P 500 has only averaged a 6 bps gain on Fed days since Powell has been at the helm.  That compares to 16 bps for his predecessor, a 50 bps gain for Bernanke and a 26 bps gain for Greenspan. While that may be the case for full-day changes, it’s worth nothing that earlier in the day would be an entirely different story.  In fact, between 2:30 PM EST and up until the final half hour of trading, Powell Fed days have actually been on pace for the second strongest stock price reactions of any Fed chair. That means sharp declines at the end of the day can largely be credited for the Fed day weakness during Powell’s tenure.  It almost wouldn’t be a Powell Fed day without a post-presser sell-off!

Below is a closer look at the S&P 500’s average intraday path on Powell Fed days.  The red line shows the S&P’s average path across all 61 Powell Fed days since his tenure began in 2018, while the blue line shows just the last ten Powell Fed days.  Under both scenarios, the market has been sitting on solid gains heading into the 2 PM ET rate decision, but the final hour of trading has averaged a pretty steep drop.

Country ETFs Looking for Record Years

Sep 16, 2025

Now in the home stretch of Q3, international stocks have had a banner year in 2025. Whereas the United States’ S&P 500 (SPY) is currently up 12.7% year to date, the MSCI All World Ex. US ETFs (ACWX) have gained well over 24% in that same span.  Looking at individual country ETFs in the iShares MSCI family, there have been some monumental winners.  For example, Italy (EWI) is up over 45% on a year to date basis. That puts it on pace for the ETF’s largest annual gain on record (it began trading in March 1996) if it holds. The ETF tracking Spain (EWP) has similarly been around since the late 1990s, and its 58% gain this year narrowly beats the 55.8% gain observed in 2003 for its best year on record.  Elsewhere in Europe, Norway (ENOR) and Poland (EPOL) are likewise sitting on what would be record gains, although those ETFs have much less extensive histories of a little more than a decade. Finally, we would note that outside of Europe, there is one other country whose tracking ETF is looking for a record. That is South Africa (EZA) which is currently up 45.8%. While that is in fact looking to be a record annual gain, it’s by a much more narrow margin than the others.  In 2009, EZA rose 45.3% which is only 50 bps of underperformance relative to this year.