Finance
The Fed meets with uncertainty permeating the air. Here’s what to expect
US Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell speaks at the Economic Club of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois, on April 16, 2025.
Kamil Krzaczynski | Afp | Getty Images
The Federal Reserve heads into its closely watched policy decision Wednesday with a strong incentive to do absolutely nothing.
Faced with unresolved questions over President Donald Trump’s tariffs and an economy that is signaling both significant strengths and weaknesses, central bank policymakers can do little for now except sit and wait as events unfold.
“It’s going to be awkward at this meeting. The Fed doesn’t have a forecast to convey anything about the next couple meetings,” said Vincent Reinhart, a former long-time Fed official and now chief economist at BNY Investments. “The Fed’s got to wait for two things: It’s to see that the policy actually goes into place … But then, when it’s demonstrated, it’s got to see how inflation expectations react. So that’s why the Fed’s got to delay, then go slow.”
Indeed, futures market pricing is implying almost no chance of an interest rate cut at this week’s meeting, and only about a 1-in-3 probability of a move at the June 17-18 session, according to the CME Group’s FedWatch gauge.
Market expectations have shifted over the past week in response both to mixed economic signals as well as signs that President Donald Trump is getting at least a bit less aggressive in his tariff approach. The White House has signaled that several trade deals are nearing completion, though none have been announced yet.
Reinhart said his firm has two cuts plugged in for this year, a bit tighter of a path than the market expectations for three reductions starting in July. A week ago, markets were betting on as many as four cuts, starting in June.
Direction from Powell
Fed Chair Jerome Powell will be left at his post-meeting news conference to explain the thinking from him and his colleagues on where they see policy heading.
“The other unsatisfying part is they don’t know what they’re going to do in June,” Reinhart said. “So he’s going to have to say everything’s on the table. He always says it, but this time, he’s going to have to mean it.”
Powell, though, is sure to face questioning about how policymakers see the recent barrage of data, which has painted a picture of economy loaded with pessimism from consumers and business executives that has yet to feed into hard numbers such as spending and employment.
While gross domestic product fell at a 0.3% annualized rate in the first quarter, it was largely the product of a surge in imports ahead of Trump’s April 2 tariff announcement. The April nonfarm payrolls report showed that hiring continued at a solid pace, with the economy adding a better-than-expected 177,000 jobs for the month.
At the same time, manufacturing and service sector surveys show deep concern about inflation and supply impacts from tariffs. Also, consumer optimism is at multi-year lows while inflation expectations are at multi-decade highs.
It all adds up to a tightrope for Powell and Co. to walk at least through the June meeting.
No ‘dot plot’ this time
“The Fed is going to project in their statement, in their press conference, patience. Wait to see more data,” said Tony Rodriguez, head of fixed income strategy at Nuveen. “Too much uncertainty to act right now, but prepare to act if they begin to see weakness in the employment market.”
Nuveen also expects just two cuts this year and two more next year as the Fed navigates slowing growth and tariff-fueled price increases.
“Our expectation is you’re going to see nothing at this meeting,” Rodriguez said. “They just need to see more hard data, which we don’t think will become really clear until call it June or July. I would think of the September meeting as being the first cut.”
The Fed at this meeting does not update its economic projections nor its “dot plot” of individual member expectations for interest rates. That will come in June. So the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee will be left to tweaks in the post-meeting statement and Powell’s news conference to drop any possible hints of its collective thinking.
“We think it will take a couple of months for enough hard data evidence to accumulate to make the case for a cut,” Goldman Sachs economist David Mericle said in a note. Goldman expects the Fed to cut in July, September and October in an effort to head off economic weakness, which the firm expects to take priority over inflation concerns.
One wild card in the equation: Trump, as he did during his first term, has been urging the Fed to cut rates as inflation edges closer to the central bank’s 2% objective.
However, Reinhart, the BNY economist, does not see the Fed bending to Trump’s will nor breaking ranks despite public statements from some members showing division on policy.
“The White House has done Jay Powell a favor in keeping his committee together. Because generally, when a family is criticized from from the outside, it’s less willing to criticize each other,” Reinhart said. “Do you criticize Jay Powell now and line yourself up the president? Probably not, if you worked your whole life in the Federal Reserve system.”
Cybersecurity and enterprise software stocks have been market dogs in 2026, with fears that AI will wipe out a wide range of companies in the enterprise space dominating the narrative. But they snapped a brutal losing streak this past week, joining in the broader market rally that saw all losses from the U.S.-Iran war regained by the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500.
Cybersecurity has been “a victim of some of the AI-related headlines,” Christian Magoon, Amplify ETFs CEO, said on this week’s “ETF Edge.”
It wasn’t just niche cybersecurity names. Take Microsoft, for example, which was recently down close to 20% for the year. Its shares surged last week by 13%.
A big driver of the pummeling in software stocks was a rotation within tech by investors to AI infrastructure and semiconductors and some other names in large-cap tech, Magoon said, and since cybersecurity stocks and ETFs are heavily weighted towards software companies, they were left behind even as those businesses continue to grow on a fundamental basis.
But Wall Street now has become more bullish with the stocks at lower levels. Brent Thill, Jefferies tech analyst, said last week that the worst may be over for software stocks. “I think that this concept that software is dead, and then Anthropic and OpenAI are going to kill the entire industry, is just over-exaggerated,” he said on CNBC’s “Money Movers” on Wednesday.
“Big Short” investor Michael Burry wrote in a Substack post on Wednesday that he is becoming bullish about software stocks after the recent selloff. “Software stocks remain interesting because of accelerated extreme declines last week arising from a reflexive positive feedback loop between falling software stocks and changes in the market for their bank debt,” he wrote.
The Global X Cybersecurity ETF (BUG), is down about 12% since the beginning of the year, with top holdings including Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, Akamai Technologies and CrowdStrike. But BUG was up 12% last week. The First Trust NASDAQ Cybersecurity ETF (CIBR) is down 6% for the year, but up 9% in the past week.
Piper Sandler analyst Rob Owens reiterated an “overweight” rating on Palo Alto Networks which helped the stock pop 7% — it is now down roughly 6% on the year. Its peers saw similar moves, including CrowdStrike.
Performance of Global X cybersecurity ETF versus S&P 500 over past one-year period.
Magoon said expectations may have become too high in cybersecurity, and with a crowding effect among investors, solid results were not enough to to push stocks higher. But the down-and-then-back-up 2026 for the sector is also a reminder that when stocks fall sharply in a short period of time, opportunity may knock.
“Once you’re down over 10% in some of these subsectors, you start to see the contrarians start to say, ‘well, maybe I’ll take a look at this,'” Magoon said.
He said AI does add both opportunity and uncertainty to the cybersecurity equation, increasing demand but also introducing new competition. But he added, “I think the dip is good to buy in an AI-driven world,” specifically because the risks to companies may lead to more M&A in cyber names that benefits the stocks.
For now, investors may look for opportunity on the margins rather than rush back into beaten-up tech names. “I think investors are still going to remain underweight software,” Thill said.
But Magoon advises investors to at least take the reminder to keep an eye on niches in the market during pronounced downturns. “The best-performing are often the least bought and do the best over the next 12 months versus late-in-the-game piling on,” he said.
While that may have been a mindset that worked against the last investors into cybersecurity and enterprise software in mid-2025 when the negative sentiment started building, at least for now, it’s started working for the stocks in the sector again.
Meanwhile, this year’s biggest winner is also a good example of what can be an extended trade in either a bullish or bearish direction. Last year, institutional ownership of energy was at multi-year lows, Magoon said, referencing Bank of America data. “Reverse sentiment can be a great indicator,” he said.
But he cautioned that any selective buying of stocks that have dipped does have to contend with the risk that there is a potentially bigger drawdown in the market yet to come in 2026. That is because midterm election years historically have been marked by large drawdowns. “If you think it is bad right now, it could get a lot worse,” Magoon said. But he added that there’s a silver-lining in that data, too, for the patient investor. The market has posted very strong 12-month returns after midterm election drawdowns end. So, for investors with a longer-term time horizon and no need for short-term liquidity, Magoon said, “stick in there.”
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New innovation in the exchange-traded fund industry could come at a cost to investors during extreme conditions.
According to MFS Investment Management’s Jamie Harrison, ETFs involved in increasingly complex derivatives and less transparent markets may be in uncharted territory when it comes to violent downturns.
“Those would be something that you’d want to keep an eye on as volatility ramps up,” the firm’s head of ETF capital markets told CNBC’s “ETF Edge” this week. “As innovation continues to increase at a rapid pace within the ETF wrapper, [it’s] definitely something that we advise our clients to be really front-footed about… Lack of transparency could absolutely be an issue if we’re going to start seeing some deep sell-offs.”
His firm has been around since 1924 and is known for inventing the open-end mutual fund. Last year, ETF.com named MFS Investment Management as the best new ETF issuer.
“It’s important to do due diligence on the portfolio,” he said. “Having a firm that has deep partnerships, deep bench of subject matter experts that plays with the A-team in terms of the Street and liquidity providers available [are] super important.”
Liquidity as the real issue?
Harrison suggested the real issue is liquidity, particularly during a steep sell-off.
“We’ve all seen the news and the headlines around potential private credit ETFs. That picture becomes much more murky,” he added. “It’s up to advisors, to investors [and] to clients to really dig in and look under the hood and engage with their issuers.”
He noted investors will have to ask some tough questions.
“What does this look like in a 20% drawdown? How does this liquidity facility work? Am I going to be able to get in? Am I going to be able to get out? And if I’m able to get out, am I able to get out at a price that’s tight to NAV [net asset value], and what’s the infrastructure at your shop in terms of managing that consideration for me,” said Harrison.
Amplify ETFs’ Christian Magoon is also concerned about these newer ETF strategies could weather a monster drawdown. He listed private credit as a red flag.
“If your ETF owns private credit, I think it’s worth taking a look at, kind of what the standards are around liquidity and how that ETF is trading, because that should be a bit of a mismatch between the trading pace of ETFs and the underlying asset,” the firm’s CEO said in the same interview.
Magoon also highlighted potential issues surrounding equity-linked notes. The notes provide fixed income security while offering potentially higher returns linked to stocks or equity indexes.
“Those could potentially be in stress due to redemptions and the underlying credit risk. That’s another kind of unique derivative,” Magoon said. “I would very closely look at any ETF that has equity-linked notes should we get into a major drawdown or there be a contagion in private credit or something related to the banking system.”
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