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Fed Standing Pat Leaves U.S. Stocks Facing Familiar Enemies List

Fed Standing Pat Leaves U.S. Stocks Facing Familiar Enemies List

(Bloomberg) -- The Federal Reserve is out of the way. Now investors can get back to worrying about everything else that has put a lid on equity prices for more than a year.

To review, those include tumbling earnings, rising valuations and a presidential race. And while none could keep traders from pushing up stocks after Wednesday’s decision to hold the policy rate unchanged for a sixth meeting, money managers predicted it won’t take long for the celebration to die down.

For now, bulls can take heart. The S&P 500 Index surged after Janet Yellen’s Fed joined the Bank of Japan in affirming its commitment to holding rate policy steady. Even with the advance, though, the benchmark measure for U.S. equities remains down in September, poised for its first back-to-back monthly decline since February.

“To add to stock holdings here would be betting on a lot of unknowns, and that can be painful in the long run,” said Tom Mangan, senior vice president of James Investment Research Inc. in Xenia, Ohio, which oversees about $6.5 billion. “I don’t see much of a rationale for stocks to continue to get more and more expensive.”

Fed Standing Pat Leaves U.S. Stocks Facing Familiar Enemies List

Policy makers said the case for higher rates has strengthened but decided “to wait for further evidence of continued progress” toward the central bank’s objectives. Three officials voted against the decision, up from one at the last meeting, and the Fed signaled it’s still prepared to raise rates in December.

Their inaction leaves investors on the same ground they occupied in August, with evidence of a thriving U.S. labor market diluted by weakening retail sales and industrial production, as well as drops in sentiment at service companies and manufacturers. S&P 500 profits are forecast to drop 1.4 percent in the July-September period, the sixth straight quarterly retreat, while the index’s price-earnings ratio of 20 is one of the highest since 2003.

“Valuations and earnings are what’s going to start to matter, as long as the Fed is on the sidelines watching,” said Randy Warren, who manages more than $100 million at Exton, Pennsylvania-based Warren Financial Service & Associates Inc. “When those P/E ratios start to come down because earnings start to rise, things will start to look more stable.”

At the same time, while concern about earnings and valuations and even presidential politics have been a barrier to gains, they’ve repeatedly failed to kill a bull market that since March 2009 has restored $14 trillion to U.S. equity prices. While economic growth has fallen short of forecasts, gross domestic product continues to sputter along, estimated at 1.5 percent in 2016 according to a Bloomberg survey of economists.

The S&P 500 rallied for five straight months starting in March when it soared 6.6 percent to erase the worst start to a year on record. Stocks extended gains Wednesday when Yellen said asset valuations are “not out of line with historical norms” and mentioned that raising rates too soon could damp growth.

“Will the markets race up to a new high again? We certainly could see that. I don’t see a lot of downside here, unless there’s a real scare about what happens in the election,” said Timothy Ghriskey, who helps manage $1.5 billion as chief investment officer at Solaris Asset Management LLC in New York. “The Fed always says they’re not political, but I think in this case maybe they are, until they see what happens.”

While the Fed standing pat removed the most visible threat to equities, gains Wednesday weren’t enough to push the S&P 500 above its level on Sept. 8, just before hawkish comments by Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren spurred the biggest selloff since Britain’s vote to quit the European Union. He joined Esther George and Loretta Mester in voting against the decision to hold off in a rate increase, according to the statement.

The rally also left stocks roughly in line with the average forecast of Wall Street equity strategists surveyed by Bloomberg, who see the equity benchmark ending 2016 at 2,156. Odds in futures markets for a tightening this year sit just below 60 percent after the Fed said the “case for an increase in the federal funds rate has strengthened” in its statement.

“It’s meaningful that there were three dissents in the voting. I think it’s going to be harder at each subsequent meeting to not do anything,” said Walter Todd, who oversees about $1.1 billion as chief investment officer for Greenwood Capital Associates LLC in South Carolina. “As I sit here today I would expect them to want to move in December.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Joseph Ciolli in New York at jciolli@bloomberg.net, John Hyland in New York at jhyland22@bloomberg.net. To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jeremy Herron at jherron8@bloomberg.net, John Shipman