"Pre-Mature" Markets Are Confident In A Fed Pivot, But "I Don't See It" Happening

Friend of Fringe Finance and well known financial news contributor - as well as 38 year veteran of markets - Kenny Polcari has been kind enough to share his most recent thoughts on the market with our

Friend of Fringe Finance and well known financial news contributor - as well as 38 year veteran of markets - Kenny Polcari has been kind enough to share his most recent thoughts on the market with our readers.

For those who aren’t familiar with Kenny or don’t recognize him from TV, he is Managing Partner of Kace Capital Advisors and Chief Market Strategist at SlateStone Wealth. He started his career on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) as an institutional broker back in the early eighties when the march of electronic trading was already taking its first steps, and the great bull was first learning to run.

Here’s his take on markets heading into the Thursday, February 2, 2023, trading day:

The post has been lightly edited for punctuation and grammar.

---

Markets were lower all day, and into the 2 pm Fed announcement. Then the news hit the tape: stocks got weaker, then stronger, then weaker again. The journalists – as I suggested yesterday – asked many of the same questions in many different ways – trying hard to get Fed Chair Jerome Powell to answer it differently. And then stocks started to move up, cautiously and then like gangbusters.

They rocketed higher into the bell with the Dow up 7 pts (remember it was lower by 500 pts), the S&P up 42 pts, the Nasdaq by 232 pts, the Russell added 27 pts while the Transports were once again the star of the show, rocketing higher by 550 pts or 3.75% - taking that index up 14% YTD.  

Here’s what Powell said and what I think. Jerome Powell said it this way: