Markets Await Fed's Decision on Interest Rate Cut

Pre-markets are picking up where they left off as of Tuesday’s closing bell: three major indexes advancing to all-time highs, with only the small-cap Russell 2000 slightly off this morning. The Dow is +79 points at this hour, +0.16%, the S&P 500 +13 points, +0.19%, the Nasdaq +88 points, +0.34% and the Russell 2000 is -2 points at this hour.

Of course, we await the 25 basis-point (bps) interest rate cut from the Fed at today’s latest Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting — the second cut of this late 2025 cycle, which most investors now will extend to the FOMC December meeting. This will bring the Fed funds rate down to 3.75-4.00% — the lowest we’ve seen since mid-December 2022, when the Fed was busy ratcheting up interest rates.

It’s tough to see much juice left to be squeezed from this orange. All-time market highs? I mean, Q3 earnings season has been solid and all, but without the specter of lower interest rates for longer — especially when Fed Chair Jerome Powell is replaced in May, at the latest — we likely wouldn’t be seeing such lofty evaluations outside of industries directly impacted by AI spending. There is currently a +100% chance of a rate cut today, +86% at the December meeting (for another 25 bps) and +44% at the January 2026 meeting.

Speaking of the AI trade, NVIDIA (NVDA) remains king of the mountain. A vast and varied amount of chip supply to companies across the AI-investing spectrum has led CEO Jensen Huang’s company to open today’s trading as the first-ever $5 trillion market cap stock. Forward P/E is now nearly 50x per share, which is high, but still nowhere near the “bubble-level” valuations we saw from the dot-com firms a quarter century ago.

Q3 Earnings at a Glance: Boeing, Caterpillar & More

Boeing (BA) brought along some disappointing news with its Q3 report this morning, with a $4.9 billion loss on its 777x delivery bringing the quarterly performance to a -94% negative earnings surprise: -$7.47 per share versus expectations of -$3.85. However, revenues were promising at $23.27 billion — well ahead of $21.92 billion expected and $17.84 billion from the year-ago quarter. The company did report it is free-cash-flow positive for the first time in two years.

Caterpillar (CAT) shares are up more than +5% at this hour, with Q3 earnings reaching $4.95 per share, versus estimates of $4.52 — a +9.5% earnings beat. Revenues of $17.64 billion in the quarter outpaced projections by +5.3%. The heavy machinery giant is also benefiting from the AI trade, as its equipment has been busy breaking ground on new data centers. The stock is up nearly double from its April 7th lows.

Verizon (VZ) had a mixed Q3 report this morning, outpacing expectations on its bottom line by 2 cents to $1.21 per share, on $33.82 billion in quarterly sales, which missed the Zacks consensus by -1%. Shares, however, are up +3% so far in early trading, swinging to a positive now year to date.

What to Expect from the Stock Market Today

Aside from the big FOMC announcement at 2pm ET today (and subsequent press conference with Fed Chair Powell), we’ll see Pending Home Sales for September later this morning. Expectations are for a slowdown to +1.0% from +4.0% the previous month. This is not usually a market-shifting set of data, but with the government shutdown now moving into its fifth week, we’ll take any breadcrumbs along the economic path we can find.

The real news after the FOMC meeting will be after-market earnings reports, including from some of the biggest Mag 7 companies, such as Microsoft (MSFT), Alphabet (GOOGL) and Meta (META). Also reporting will be companies like Starbucks (SBUX) and cloud-based security provider ServiceNow (NOW). Of these, only Meta is a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) and Starbucks is a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell). All other firms are presently Zacks Rank #3 (Hold)-rated.

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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

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