Interest rates are one of 2025’s biggest ‘wild cards’

It’s become evident that the stock market (^DJI, ^IXIC, ^GSPC) wasn’t gifted a Santa Claus rally this holiday season, but that isn’t stopping equities from finally coming to life in Monday’s session to kick off 2025. Horizon Investments Head of Portfolio Strategy Zachary Hill calls the notion of a Santa Claus rally “a statistical anomaly,” now turning his attention to the upcoming earnings season as the next major driver in the new year.

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“We’ll be paying quite a lot of attention to… just obviously the fourth quarter but also… full year guidance for 2025… On the Fed [Federal Reserve] side of things, we have seen a little bit of a shift in terms of the market’s overall thought process for how they’re weighing growth and inflation,” Hill tells Seana Smith and Brad Smith on Morning Brief.

“So we are a little bit lower, you know on the S&P (^GSPC)and small caps, even lower than where we were before the Fed cut rates in the middle of December. But really abstracting from all of that, I mean, our most important view around… what we think about Fed policy is they’re still talking about cutting interest rates, and they’re not talking about raising rates. And so that’s going to continue to be something we can argue about..”

Hill identifies interest rates and the volatility associated with President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed tariff policies as two “wild cards” he will be paying attention to this year.

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This post was written by Luke Carberry Mogan.