Jackson Hole has not been friendly to the stock market in recent years

The week’s main event is still ahead of us: Fed Chair Jay Powell will give his speech on Friday at the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium.

Steve Sosnick, chief market strategist at Interactive Brokers, flags that recently, whether it’s because of the content of the monetary head honcho’s message or the simply timing of his speech, the price action in markets after these events has been “uninspiring.”

2022 was a marked outlier to the downside, with Powell saying the central bank would “bring some pain” to the economy in order to get inflation lower.

“Of course, three annual observations is hardly a robust sample size, but it is worth noting that the S&P 500 was down four and five weeks after each of the last occurrences,” writes Sosnick. “That may be attributable as much to September seasonality as it is to the speeches themselves, but those speeches indeed played a role in setting the tone for the weeks that follow.”