Review & Preview: The Fed Cuts, Wall Street Yawns

Sep 17, 2025 19:01:00 -0400 by Connor Smith | #Markets #Review & Preview

Wish Granted. Like a dog chasing cars, Wall Street didn’t know what to do with itself once it finally got its rate cut.

The S&P 500 closed down 0.1% after wavering throughout the day. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 260 points, or 0.6%. The Nasdaq Composite fell 0.3%.

The major indexes moved wildly in the hour after the Federal Open Market Committee decided to cut its target for the federal-funds rate by a quarter of a point to a range of 4% to 4.25%.

One Fed member dissented on the move. Stephen Miran, a Trump ally fresh off his confirmation as a Federal Reserve governor on Tuesday, voted for a half-point cut.

“There wasn’t widespread support at all for a 50-basis-point cut this week,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said during his press conference. “We’ve done very large rate hikes and very large rate cuts in the last five years, and you tend to do those at a time when you feel that policy is out of place and needs to move quickly to a new place.”

Asked about Miran, Powell said the committee welcomed the new member and “remains united in pursuing our dual-mandate goals.”

Later, when asked about the potential influence of Miran, Powell noted there are 19 members of the FOMC committee, 12 of whom vote at any one time.

“The only way for any voter to really move things around is to be incredibly persuasive,” Powell said. “And the only way to do that in the context in which we work is to make really strong arguments based on the data and one’s understanding of the economy. That’s really all that matters. And that’s how it’s going to work.”

The other members weren’t convinced about the need to cut rates rapidly. For the rest of the year, officials projected two quarter-point cuts, according to their Summary of Economic Projections. They signaled just one additional cut for 2026.

Some on Wall Street may have been hoping for more after the stock market rallied to record levels in recent months. That would explain the sideways trading even though Wall Street finally got what it was pining for all year.

You can read Barron’s full coverage of the Fed decision here.

Company

Last

Chg

Chg%

Dow Jones Industrial Average

46,018.32

260.42

0.57%

S&P 500 Index

6,600.35

-6.41

-0.10%

NASDAQ Composite Index

22,261.33

-72.63

-0.33%

Market Data as of

The Hot Stock: Hologic +7.7%
The Biggest Loser: Builders FirstSource -5.6%

Best Sector: Financials +1.0%
Worst Sector: Industrials -0.5%

Created with Highcharts 9.0.1Wednesday, Sept. 17Index performanceSource: FactSetAs of Sept. 17, 4 p.m. ET

Created with Highcharts 9.0.1Sept. 17-1.50-1.25-1.00-0.75-0.50-0.2500.250.500.751.001.25%Dow industrialsS&P 500Nasdaq Composite

The Not-So-Hot Ticket

After years of false-starts, the initial public offering market is back in a big way. Big names like CoreWeave, Figma, Circle, and Chime have all tested the waters, and hype about crypto and artificial intelligence have added to excitement.

“Investors that want to own a piece of this future will find it in the IPO
market,” writes Bill Smith, founder of Renaissance Capital. “Because now, in 2025, we’re staring down the barrel of the largest sector-specific
IPO wave in market history.”

Emphasis on sector specific.

As Barron’s Andrew Bary warned on Friday, StubHub learned that not every IPO can be hot. Trading under the ticker symbol STUB, the company’s stock fell more than 6% in its debut on the New York Stock Exchange today.

My Barron’s colleague Paul R. La Monica writes that the online ticket marketplace priced its IPO at the middle of the expected range and sold 34 million shares at a price of $23.50. After a brief pop, it closed at $22. Paul writes:

At the $23.50 offering price, StubHub raised $800 million. The company is worth $8.1 billion based on where it closed Wednesday. Despite the stock slide, that valuation isn’t too shabby considering that the company, which was founded in 2000, was bought by eBay in 2007 for $310 million and then sold to European ticket reseller Viagogo in 2020 for more than $4 billion.

Paul spoke with StubHub co-founder and CEO Eric Baker, who said Taylor Swift’s popular Era’s tour that ran from March 2023 to December 2024 had a big impact on growth figures in the first half of this year. Subtracting Swift, gross merchandise sales—the dollar value of tickets—rose 20% from a year ago, he told Paul.

“The vision is for StubHub to be the destination for all live events,” Baker said, adding that the IPO is a key milestone for the company because StubHub will be able to use proceeds to pay down debt, clean up its balance sheet, and focus on growth.

Still, investors also have to accept the fact that Baker has overwhelming control of the company with a nearly 88% stake in the voting shares. Baker left the business after a falling out with his fellow co-founder before the eBay deal. He went on to found Viagogo, now StubHub’s owner.

You can read more of Paul’s StubHub IPO coverage here.

The Calendar

Darden Restaurants, FactSet Research Systems, FedEx, and Lennar report quarterly results tomorrow.

What We’re Reading Today

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