Bespoke on Tomorrow's Fed Minutes

From Bespoke Investment Group:

With little in the way of news flow this week, investors are already turning their attention to tomorrow's release of the Fed Minutes at 2PM.  While the Fed minutes are typically well orchestrated and try to provide little in the way of surprises to the market, traders will be paying particularly close attention for any clues as to when the dreaded "taper" will commence.  Will it be in September or later?  A recent poll we conducted suggested that investors are evenly split on this question.

So far in 2013, days where the Fed has released the minutes from a prior meeting have not exactly been positive for the market.  The charts below show the intraday trading of the S&P 500 on each of the days where the FOMC released the minutes from a meeting.  In each chart, the red dot indicates the time when the Minutes were released (2PM).

On January 3rd, the S&P 500 erased a modest gain for the day and declined 0.38% in the last two hours of trading.  On February 2nd, the S&P 500 was already down for the day, but it fell an additional 0.72% in the last two hours of trading.  Then, on April 10th, the S&P 500 was up more than 1% when the minutes were released, and while the S&P 500 didn't decline, the rally was stopped dead in its tracks....MORE