Dow Jones Industrial Average stalls as AI stocks weigh, eyes on Fed Minutes

The Dow Jones struggled to maintain positive momentum on Monday.
Despite renewed downward pressure on key AI stocks, markets remain firmly in bull country for the year.
The last Fed check-in for 2025 is due this week, but the data docket remains otherwise limited.

Joshua Gibson FXStreet

US equities kicked off the final trading week of 2025 with a bit of a whimper, despite holding close to record highs. The truncated trading week will face a hiccup with a holiday closure on the cards later in the week, and the only meaningful point of interest on the data docket is the latest Federal Reserve (Fed) Meeting Minutes, slated for release on Tuesday.

Major indexes are struggling to find the gas pedal amid rock-bottom year-end volumes. The Standard and Poor’s 500 (SP500) index touched record intraday highs during the overnight session before cooling back to flat for the day, driven lower by another softening in the AI tech rally space and declines in the home building materials segment. The Dow Jones also reached higher during the overnight session before backsliding to a scant 100-point climb from last Friday’s close, with upward momentum sapped by a 1.7% decline in Nvidia (NVDA) shares.

Equities remain bolstered despite year-end slowdown

With the year-end Santa Claus rally keeping bids buoyed, the Dow Jones is on pace to close either bullish or at least flat for the eighth straight month, rounding the corner into the new year. Despite year-end volumes drying up, equities remain buried deep in bull country for the year. The Dow Jones is up over 14% year-to-date, with the SP500 testing a 17.5% gain from January’s opening bids.

Fed minutes in the barrel for Wednesday

The Fed will release its latest Meeting Minutes on Tuesday, and investors will be looking for signs of a dovish tilt in policymakers’ internal decision-making rhetoric. Fed officials hit a cautious tone with the latest dot plot update of interest rate expectations, with Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) voting members expecting a total of two quarter-point interest rate cuts over the next two years. Rate market speculators are expecting the Fed to get bullied into more interest rate cuts, with rate traders pricing in two rate trims by September of 2026.

Dow Jones daily chart

Economic Indicator

FOMC Minutes

FOMC stands for The Federal Open Market Committee that organizes 8 meetings in a year and reviews economic and financial conditions, determines the appropriate stance of monetary policy and assesses the risks to its long-run goals of price stability and sustainable economic growth. FOMC Minutes are released by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve and are a clear guide to the future US interest rate policy.

Why it matters to traders?

Minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) is usually published three weeks after the day of the policy decision. Investors look for clues regarding the policy outlook in this publication alongside the vote split. A bullish tone is likely to provide a boost to the greenback while a dovish stance is seen as USD-negative. It needs to be noted that the market reaction to FOMC Minutes could be delayed as news outlets don’t have access to the publication before the release, unlike the FOMC’s Policy Statement.

Author

Joshua Gibson

FXStreet

Joshua joins the FXStreet team as an Economics and Finance double major from Vancouver Island University with twelve years' experience as an independent trader focusing on technical analysis.

GBP/USD remains offered; bears target 1.3600

GBP/USD now leaves behind part of its recent recovery and revisits the low 1.3600s at the beginning of the week. Indeed, Cable trades with a mild downward bias amid decent gains in the Greenback as investors remain wary of upcoming US data releases and the Jackson Hole event.

EUR/USD remains sidelined above 1.1650

EUR/USD trades on the defensive following the closing bell on Wall Street on Monday, hovering around the 1.1660 region and adding to Friday’s small decline. The pair’s pullback comes in response to an acceptable rebound in the US Dollar in a context of generalised caution ahead of key US data releases and Chair Warsh’s speech in Jackson Hole.

Gold poised to extend its bullish run

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XRP surged 72%, but is the rally really about XRP?

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Convulsion in credit markets

The United States government just posted a $432.3 billion deficit for July, the largest monthly shortfall since March of 2021. That single burst of red ink pushed the yeartodate deficit to $1.8 trillion, with two months still remaining in fiscal 2026. At this pace, Washington will soon wax nostalgic for the “good old days” when annual deficits were only $2 trillion.

$20 billion offered, $2 billion taken: Why Treasury doubled its buyback cap

The US Treasury moved off its own calendar on Wednesday, and that is the part worth sitting with. At 12:32 GMT, the department said it would at least double the size of liquidity support buyback operations in the 10-year to 20-year and 20-year to 30-year sectors, lifting the maximum from $2 billion per operation to at least $4 billion, effective September 9 and running to November 4.