Stock Markets Ready to Open Up after FOMC Meeting
Major stock market indices closed on a positive note Wednesday at the end of trading. They were somewhat buoyed by the Fed’s decision to hold off rate cuts.
The Dow Jones closed up by 401 points, or 1.03%. S&P 500 ended the day with an increase of 0.89%, and the Nasdaq Composite closed positive by 1.25%.
This follows the highly anticipated FOMC meeting on Wednesday where the Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell stated that no interest rate cuts would be scheduled just yet. The Fed is still waiting to see healthy progress toward a 2% US inflation rate. That rate currently stands at 3.2% according to the figures released in February, which is up from January’s 3.1%.
With inflation not headed in the right direction, estimates put interest rate cuts to happen in June at the earliest. Those rates are currently at 5.25%-5.50% and have remained there for months. It may be more realistic at this point to anticipate a November date for interest rate cuts.
Big Stock Gainers from Wednesday
The major earner for the Nasdaq Composite on Wednesday was XTL Biopharmaceuticals Inc., which gained 128%. That jump came after XTL acquired The Social Proxy Ltd., which makes AI programs.
Micron Technology gained 14% over on the S&P 500 to lead that stock index.
The top earners continue to be AI-related tech stocks as well as a few medical stocks. We expect the market to stay up today and post high numbers as a few more earnings reports come in and the interest rate cuts remain somewhere in the future. Most of the stock gains will be off of product announcements, like Nvidia’s new Blackwell processor, as well as positive earnings reports as economic data stay mostly flat and promises very little change from one FOMC meeting to the next for now.
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