By Suzanne McGee
(Reuters) -Investors will next week train their sights on Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where Federal Reserve policymakers gather for their annual policy symposium, in a search for clues on the path of interest rate cuts that could boost stocks to more record highs.
This year's gathering follows a week in which consumer and wholesale price data appeared to send mixed signals about how well the economy is weathering U.S. President Donald Trump's sweeping import tariffs. Its climax will be
on Friday, when Fed Chair Jerome Powell is scheduled to speak following what will have been a data-light week.
After last week's flurry of data demonstrated that consumers are resilient and the jobs market is not dead, some investors still fret Powell may use the gathering to pour cold water on widespread expectations for interest rate cuts in the coming weeks, which have pushed stock indexes to multiple records, citing other figures suggesting that inflation remains a problem.
"We may have a lot at stake; this is a potentially significant event this year," said Steven Sosnick, market strategist at IBKR. "What if, once again, people are going into this expecting a dovish Powell and he comes out with all guns blazing?"
The futures market still expects the Federal Open Market Committee to cut rates by a quarter of a percentage point at least twice more this year, including an initial cut at its mid-September meeting.
Companies likely to benefit most from lower borrowing costs have been among the big winners in recent Wall Street trading, said Andrew Slimmon, head of Applied Equity Advisors at Morgan Stanley Asset Management.
"It's all about homebuilders, cyclical stocks, industrials, and materials companies," Slimmon said.
Shares of leading homebuilders such as PulteGroup, Lennar, and D.R. Horton are up between 4.2% and 8.8% in the last week, as of midday Friday, thanks largely to the recent drop in mortgage lending rates.
Their gains trounced the 1% rally in the Standard & Poor's 500 index over the last week. The group has outpaced the broader market more dramatically over the last month, with gains of 15% to 22% compared to 3.3% for the S&P 500. But their future gains hinge on mortgage rates continuing to fall, something that a recent uptick in 10-year Treasury bond yields puts into question.
Any hint by Powell that he is paying more heed to bearish signals on inflation than to other, more benign indicators might threaten those gains, Slimmon said.
"The more I have seen the homebuilders rally, the more it tells me the market thinks the Fed is going to cut, which means any suggestion at Jackson Hole that this is not going to happen will make markets more vulnerable" to a selloff, he added.
To keep markets calm, Powell will have to walk a fine line and underscore the Goldilocks conviction held by many investors that the economy is neither overheating nor at risk of tipping into a recession, said Ashwin Alankar, head of global asset allocation at Janus Henderson.
"He can't scare the market by saying the Fed believes the economy really needs a lot of stimulus," Alankar said.
SENTIMENT SHIFT?
Some market-watchers on Thursday said they already detected a shift in sentiment. In a note to clients, Thierry Wizman, global FX and rates strategist at Macquarie Group, said as recently as Wednesday, "the talk on the street was of a 'mega' rate cut" but that a dovish cut in September was "more grounded in reality."
Other factors make Powell's comments even more important for stocks this year, investors said. In addition to the market's lofty levels and a recent slide in the Cboe Volatility Index to its lowest level this year, a string of positive second-quarter earnings results is drawing to a close, leaving investors few signals to guide them during the late-summer doldrums.
"The calendar is getting pretty quiet," said Jeff Blazek, co-chief investment officer, multi-asset, at Neuberger Berman.
The biggest risk of all, however, may be the market's recent euphoria, which has defied a litany of bad news and left April's tariff-driven nosedive in the rear-view mirror.
"Going into this event, the more smug we feel ... the greater the risk of a market-moving reaction," said Sosnick.
(Reporting by Suzanne McGee; Editing by Michelle Price and Rod Nickel)
