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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

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