Latest / Arctos x Teddy Sin - Coffee Break, Market Take / 28/10/2026 Wed - The rate decision is not the real event
Transcript
- This is my AI voice. The script comes from my market research system, and a person checks it before it goes out. It's education, not personal investment advice. Good morning. Teddy here. It's Wednesday, the twenty-eighth of October. Most people will wake up tomorrow and ask one question. Did the Fed hike or not? I think that's the wrong question. Let me explain why, and then we'll walk through what moved overnight. The Fed's two-day meeting ends today in Washington. The decision lands at two in the morning, Malaysia time, on Thursday. The press conference follows at two thirty. The rate range sits at 3.75% to 4.00%, after a hike in September. Here's the thing. Futures already price about a 90.6% chance of a hold. So a hold is not news. What is still open is the next step. Markets price roughly a 73% chance of another hike by the end of the year. That number is what moves tomorrow. If the tone sounds like December is still live, the pressure leans one way. If it sounds like they're done, it leans the other. That's why I call it two-way pressure on the Nasdaq, the Dow, gold and bitcoin until the words are out. Now, what moved overnight. Three things. First, tech came back. The Nasdaq rose 1.18% to 26,477. The S&P 500 gained 0.6%. The Russell 2000, the small caps, rose 1.16%. Two stories pushed it. Anthropic filed for its IPO, and Nvidia plans to invest three billion dollars in Meta. Investors read that as the AI spending story still having legs. But look at the Dow. It barely moved, up just 0.03%. Boeing fell about ten percent after missing earnings and cutting its delivery target. One heavy stock can hold a whole index in place. Underneath, US consumer confidence came in at 91.7, against 81 expected. That is a strong number, and it gives the Fed one more reason not to rush into easing. Second, oil cooled. Brent settled at $113.88, down about 1.7%. WTI settled at $99.90, just under a hundred dollars. Officials from Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan met Iran in Tehran, and Iran signalled some flexibility on reopening the Strait of Hormuz. But don't treat that as the end of the story. There was a fire at Saudi Arabia's Ras Tanura terminal after an attack, and Houthi attacks have resumed. So I read oil as downward pressure while talks hold, with medium reliability. One tanker attack can flip that. And here's the link most people miss. Lower oil means less inflation worry. Less inflation worry means less reason for the Fed to keep hiking. That's partly why gold recovered yesterday, to around $4,058, up about one percent. Third, Asia split in two. The Nikkei closed 1.7% higher at 63,268 on Tuesday, ending a three-day losing streak. Advantest jumped nine percent on the chip rally. But Hong Kong went the other way. The Hang Seng closed 0.73% lower at 23,041. HSBC slumped about six percent after a third-quarter miss. Same day, same region, opposite candles. At home, the KLCI closed 0.47% higher at 1,611.85 on bargain hunting. Turnover rose to 3.1 billion ringgit. But foreign selling is still there, and that keeps a lid on things. Europe followed the tech mood. Germany's DAX closed about 0.7% higher at 25,590, led by Infineon, up nearly five percent. Bitcoin sat around eighty thousand six hundred dollars at the US close. Spot bitcoin ETFs took in 110 million dollars on Monday, after two days of outflows. Both will feel the Fed tonight. So what do I watch today? The clock. Inside six hours on Thursday morning, three things happen. The Fed at two. Then Microsoft and Alphabet report after the US close. Later in the week, the Bank of Japan meets, with a hold at 1.25% expected. You don't need to guess any of these. Nobody can. Not me either. What you need is your risk size decided before you sleep tonight. Not at two in the morning, half awake, staring at a screen. I've learned this the expensive way. The trades that hurt me most were never the ones where I was wrong. They were the ones where I was too big when I was wrong. Read the pressure. Check your own chart. Size your risk first. This is educational market commentary, not personal financial advice. No outcome is guaranteed. Markets carry risk of loss. Size your risk before any trade. Survive first. See you tomorrow.