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Posted November 19, 2025 at 11:58 am
Markets are bracing for a holiday week packed with economic data, retail earnings, and Fed uncertainty. Will traders feast on opportunity or wobble under volatility? Tune in for insights from IBKR’s Jeff Praissman who hosts Scott Bauer of Prosper Trading Academy.
The following is a summary of a live audio recording and may contain errors in spelling or grammar. Although IBKR has edited for clarity no material changes have been made.
Hi everyone. This is Jeff Praissman with the Interactive Brokers Podcast. It’s my pleasure to welcome back to the podcast studio Scott Bauer from Prosper Trading Academy. Hey Scott, how are you?
Jeff, we’re hanging in there. There’s some concern out there, but everything is good and we’re hanging in there.
Yeah, I was gonna say it’s been a rough week for the market, right? With the S&P 500 and Nasdaq falling below their 50-day moving average for, I think, the first time in over 130 trading days. The Dow Industrials experienced their worst three-day drop last week since April. Scott, is all this tech-related, or are there other sectors or factors contributing to the drop?
Certainly tech is a major part of this because of the concern about AI valuations. But if we dig a little bit deeper, we look at some of the consumer-type stocks, retail, and payment processors—those spaces are not doing well either. I think that is really contributing to the overall, let’s call it—not bearish sentiment, but some of the negative sentiment that’s out there. And then, of course, you get Target coming out and saying, “Oh boy, we’re really concerned about the holidays coming up here.” But I think we still all have to keep in mind, Jeff, that we’re still, what, 3% off the top of the market here. So I think we have to keep that in check.
Yeah, I mean, when you take a step back and actually look at the way the market is overall, it looks pretty good. There seems to be a little—I don’t wanna say controversy within the Fed—but a little disagreement. The Fed’s Vice Chair Philip Jefferson came out backing lowering rates slowly. And there’s obviously some people on the opposite side of that. How are bonds dealing in this environment, and how have they performed overall for the year?
It’s so interesting because if you look at the 10-year, since the end of October—two to three weeks or so—we saw the 10-year rally above 4.15, down from where it was under 4%. Now it’s just kind of hovering around that 4.10 to 4.12 area. I’d say there’s a lot of jitters out there based on the daily rhetoric, the daily news flow from the Fed. If you go back a year, to the beginning of December last year, the 10-year is almost in the exact same place as it was at this time last year. So I think some of the volatility in the bond market has calmed down a little bit, but the anticipation of what the Fed is going to do could be a very big precursor to maybe an outsized move. We’ve seen when the Fed has recently cut, the 10-year really sold off and rates went higher a bit. So I think there’s still so much—as Jefferson said—some people want to lower rates slowly, some are more in the camp of “we gotta cut again in December.” And that’s so reflective in the market: two weeks ago, 90-plus percent thought they were gonna cut in December. Now it’s basically 50-50.
And next week we have a shortened week. We have off for Thanksgiving, and a half-day Friday. We kind of touched on this last week in our podcast, but plenty of data coming out—just in housing alone. We’ve got the cost of housing index in the next few days, the housing market index (HMI), revised building permits, and residential sales. What effect could this have on the market?
Typically, back in the days of trading down on the floor—which wasn’t that long ago—this was one of my favorite weeks of the year because a lot of traders would take off. Volumes were typically lighter, which meant spreads were a little bit wider and a little bit more volatility because of that. But I think it may be different next week because of the deluge of news, the economic data that we’re going to get. You’re gonna have a lot more people—not just traders on the floor but institutions—really focusing in on that data next week. So I think we could see some actual heightened volumes next week because of the anticipation of all this data coming out. And we have to remember, markets are closed on Thursday and only a half-day on Friday. So that could add to some of the volatility.
And piling on this economic data, that short week we actually have several companies releasing earnings as well. Obviously we have Nvidia today, tomorrow we have Walmart and Intuit, BJ’s Friday, and Alibaba next Tuesday.
A lot of retail companies too, with Walmart and BJ’s. How could this—kind of to your point—mean this may not be a quiet holiday for any of these traders?
Not at all. Everyone obviously is looking at Nvidia earnings, which absolutely can be a big mover to the market. But I think Walmart’s really important, especially after what we heard out of Target. Let’s see what they have to say because Target was pretty downbeat on the consumer. If Walmart has that same kind of guidance or outlook, that could be very troublesome. I don’t expect that they will—I really don’t. I think Walmart can be a big boon off of the Target news here. But yes, there is no shortage of events coming up. Most of these companies, like you said—the retail—this could be a good indicator of how the consumer approaches Black Friday and the holiday season next week. Hopefully this will all be on an upbeat note, but yes, there’s a lot of news coming out.
Yeah, I could definitely see a scenario where a lot of those Target shoppers are going to Walmart instead. I think that’s a very realistic potential. Scott, this has been great. As always, love having you come by the studio. And for our listeners, to get more from Scott, go to prospertrading.com. You can also find his past podcasts on our website, as well as webinars and news articles. Scott, thanks again. Looking forward to next time.
Appreciate it, Jeff. Have a great holiday next week. Thanks.
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