The Federal Reserve's influence on the stock market has become "particularly pronounced since the onset of its unconventional policies," according to a new white paper by James Montier and Philip Pilkington of GMO's asset allocation team.
The pair examine the effect the "Wizard-of-Oz-like nature of the Fed" on the S&P 500 on days when the Federal Open Market Committee has a meeting.
The idea for Montier and Pilkington's study actually stemmed from research from the Fed itself.
The pair point to research from the New York Federal Reserve – a paper published in 2013 called "The Pre-FOMC Announcement Drift" – that finds "large average excess returns on U.S. equities in anticipation of monetary policy decisions made at scheduled meetings of the FOMC in the past few decades."
So, Montier and Pilkington decided to do their own study. Rather than using tick data as the Fed researchers did, the pair used full-day data and found they reached a similar conclusion.
They found that sometime around 1985, the market really started to react to FOMC days.
"Like the Fed economists, we found that for the past 30 or so years these announcement days have had a major, and increasing, impact on the stock market," the pair write in the report.
According to the GMO report, FOMC days account for 25% of the total real returns since 1984.
"One of our bright young colleagues, who is considerably more statistically sophisticated than we, calculated that the chance of this occurring randomly was only 0.0086% (that is, 86 out of 1 million)," Montier and Pilkington write in the report. "As he put it, 'The odds are astoundingly low!'"
According to the GMO report, beginning in the early 1980s, returns were substantially higher on FOMC days than they were on the average day. And, the period between 2008 and 2012 is particularly notable.
"Average returns on FOMC days in this period [2008-2012] were phenomenally high; some 29x higher than on the average day, testimony to the impact of QE and 'unconventional monetary policy' upon the market's behavior," the pair write in the report. "More recently, the impact the Fed is having on the market has shrunk back to its 'normal' post-1980s level accordingly. Evidence of QE fatigue perhaps?"
