The Fed Pauses - Non-Farm Payrolls on Friday

“When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate...

Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes.  This is apparent from a social pathology— psychopaths rally followers.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

The FOMC came out with their decision today.

They reduced their benchmark short term interest rate by 25 bps.

And they also signalled by a change in wording that they would be more data dependent on any future changes.

Initially this was interpreted as a hawkish stance, and the markets swerved accordingly, with Dollar up and gold/silver down and stocks a bit off.

But in a little while people realied that the Fed was merely shifting into 'neutral' and so those trades reversed.

And so gold, siver, and stocks finished higher with the Dollar lower.

This data dependency might put a little more push behind macroeconomic indicators, such as the Non-Farm Payrolls report on Friday.

After the bell some of the wunderkind stocks such as Facebook, Lyft, Etsy put forward decent results.

For the first time in a little while we saw a large offtake of gold from the Comex Hong Kong warehouses.  

And there were no tweets from Trumpolini about the Fed after their announcement this afternoon.  That was probably the most unexpected thing in some time.

Have a pleasant evening.