Outpoll Weekly Recap: Finance (December 29, 2025 – January 4, 2026)

1 day ago7 min read

The final trading week of 2025 delivered a fittingly volatile coda to a tumultuous year, with markets oscillating between year-end positioning and early bets on 2026. The S&P 500 closed the week essentially flat, a deceptive calm masking significant sectoral rotations as the ‘Santa Claus rally’ gave way to profit-taking in mega-cap tech.The real story, however, was in the bond pits and on central bank watchers’ screens. A surprise uptick in the Eurozone’s preliminary December CPI print, coupled with hawkish minutes from the ECB’s last meeting, sent German bund yields spiking and triggered a sharp recalibration of rate-cut expectations for the Frankfurt crowd.This rippled across the Atlantic, putting pressure on Treasuries and momentarily stalling the dollar’s late-year slide. The Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, the Core PCE, came in as expected at 2.2% year-over-year, but the devil was in the details: sticky services inflation kept the ‘last mile’ narrative alive, causing futures markets to slightly dial back the odds of a March cut. In corporate news, the week was dominated by strategic maneuvers rather than earnings.A major European bank announced a sweeping cost-cutting initiative, sending its shares up 5% on Thursday, while a flagship US retailer’s disappointing holiday sales guidance triggered a sector-wide selloff in consumer discretionary names. The prediction markets on Outpoll mirrored this macro nervousness, with contracts on ‘First Fed Rate Cut in Q1 2026’ seeing volatility spike and settle at a 65% probability, down from 72% the prior week.Looking ahead, the first full week of January will be all about the jobs data; a hot NFP print could swiftly extinguish the early-2026 optimism, reminding everyone that the path to the Fed’s 2% target remains a narrow and winding road. As Warren Buffett often cautions, it’s only when the tide goes out that you see who’s been swimming naked—and with liquidity conditions set to tighten, 2026 may be the year we find out.

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