Unexpectedly Intriguing!
02 September 2025
An editorial cartoon of a Wall Street bull and bear turning their heads sideways to look at a stock market chart for the SP 500 that shows a flat trend. Image generated with Microsoft Copilot Designer.

The S&P 500 (Index: SPX) touched two new record highs during the week that was, but as the week came to an end, it gave back those gains and closed out the trading week ending on Friday, 29 August 2025 at 6,460.26, just 0.1% below where it closed the previous week.

In other words, stock prices are more-or-less moving mostly sideways in accordance with prophecy! Specifically, the second of two scenarios we outlined in the previous edition of the S&P 500 chaos series for how stock prices would behave under a specific condition:

Should investors shift their time horizon inward to the nearer term, the rally in stock prices could continue. How high stock prices might rise in that event would be determined by how far into the future they might shift their focus. If that doesn't happen and investors stay focused on 2026-Q2, then stock prices will mostly move sideways within a relatively narrow range.

The latest update of the alternative futures-based chart reveals the trajectory of the S&P 500 over the past week mostly moved sideways, with investors remaining focused on the distant future quarter of 2026-Q2.

Alternative Futures - S&P 500 - 2025Q3 - Standard Model (m=-2.0 from 28 Apr 2025) - Snapshot on 29 Aug 2025

How long investors might maintain their attention on 2026-Q2 will depend upon the random onset of new information. Here are the headlines from the major market-moving headlines that influenced investor expectations during the final trading week of August 2025.

Monday, 25 August 2025
Tuesday, 26 August 2025
Wednesday, 27 August 2025
Thursday, 28 August 2025
Friday, 29 August 2025

The CME Group's FedWatch Tool projects the Fed will cut the Federal Funds Rate by a quarter percent at its 17 September (2025-Q3) meeting. Looking further forward, the FedWatch tool forecasts no rate cut in October, which it had a week earlier, but still anticipates additional quarter point rate cuts will take place on 10 December (2025-Q4) and 28 January (2026-Q1) .

The Atlanta Fed's GDPNow tool projection of real GDP growth in the U.S. during the current quarter of 2025-Q2 vaulted to +3.5% after registering +2.3% annualized growth in the preceding week.

Image credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "An editorial cartoon of a Wall Street bull and bear turning their heads sideways to look at a stock market chart for the SP 500 that shows a flat trend". We then generated a speech bubble and put the words "I GUESS WE'RE GOING... SIDEWAYS?!" into the bear's mouth to complete the cartoon.

Labels: ,

About Political Calculations

Welcome to the blogosphere's toolchest! Here, unlike other blogs dedicated to analyzing current events, we create easy-to-use, simple tools to do the math related to them so you can get in on the action too! If you would like to learn more about these tools, or if you would like to contribute ideas to develop for this blog, please e-mail us at:

ironman at politicalcalculations

Thanks in advance!

Recent Posts

Indices, Futures, and Bonds

Closing values for previous trading day.

Most Popular Posts
Quick Index

Site Data

This site is primarily powered by:

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?

CSS Validation

Valid CSS!

RSS Site Feed

AddThis Feed Button

JavaScript

The tools on this site are built using JavaScript. If you would like to learn more, one of the best free resources on the web is available at W3Schools.com.

Other Cool Resources

Blog Roll

Market Links

Useful Election Data
Charities We Support
Shopping Guides
Recommended Reading
Recently Shopped

Seeking Alpha Certified

Archives