Despite a lot of confident predictions, nobody knows what will happen at the Federal Reserve Wednesday, never mind what the impact will be on markets. Professional investors aren’t waiting around to find out. Particularly among managers who premise strategies on quantitative signals, exposure to stocks and other risky assets has been cut to the bone.
It’s not hard to see why sentiment is deteriorating. All year, any attempt to buy the dip — a strategy that had worked for a decade — has been met with fresh lows in the market. Having fallen more than 20% from its January peak amid concern the Fed’s efforts to subdue inflation will cause a recession, the S&P 500 this week entered a bear market for the second time since 2020.