Wall St rises ahead of Fed policy decision
By Amruta Khandekar and Shashwat Chauhan
(Reuters) — Wall Street's main stock indexes rose on Wednesday as investors looked forward to the Federal Reserve's monetary policy decision, while megacap stocks gained as bond yields eased after the U.S. Treasury Department's refunding plans.
The Fed is widely expected to keep interest rates unchanged, but investors will focus on Chair Jerome Powell's conference at 1430 ET (1830 GMT) after the statement to gauge how long the central bank could keep rates elevated.
Bets of a 25-basis point rate hike in December currently stand at 26.2%, as per CME Group's (NASDAQ:CME) FedWatch tool.
«For now, the Fed is very much in wait and see mode,» said Niall O' Sullivan, chief investment officer multi-asset strategies EMEA at Neuberger Berman.
«Data continues to show consumer strength and broader economic strength in the U.S. and against that, is the long end of the curve, which is to some extent acting like rate hikes.»
Meanwhile, the Treasury Department said it will slow the pace of increases in its longer-dated debt auctions in the November-January quarter and expects it will need one more additional quarter of increases after this to meet its financing needs.
«It wasn't as bad as feared. The guidance that there may be only one more quarter where it increases was somewhat comforting,» said Brian Jacobsen, chief economist at Annex Wealth Management.
The yield on the benchmark 10-year note slipped after the refunding news and was last at 4.812%.
Megacap growth stocks including Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) and Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) gained between 0.8% and 1.8%.
Five of the 11 major S&P 500 sectors were trading higher, with information technology and
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