From our perspective, investors appear to be closely focused on the distant future quarter of 2018-Q2 in setting current day stock prices.
There's an important caveat to note at this point however. Following the release of the minutes from the Fed's Federal Open Market Committee meeting on 31 October-1 November 2017 meeting, which confirmed that the Fed is all but set to announce a hike in short term u.s. interest rates at the end of its' 13 December 2017 meeting, the CME Group's FedWatch tool is now indicating that there is over a 50% probability that the Fed will move to hike short term U.S. interest rates again by the end of the first quarter of 2018, rather than waiting until the end of 2018-Q2 as the futures for the Federal Funds Rate had previously indicated.
