LONDON (ShareCast) - (Sharecast News) - Wall Street looks primed for a lower start at the end of the week ahead of the expiry of $2trn options expiry later in the session.
According to Bloomberg, some market participants believed that it was positioning in the derivatives market that had fed the drop in volatility, contributing to the calm seen in the stock market.

Hence, investors were said to now be looking for hints as to whether that tranquility would last.

Against that backdrop, as of 1333 BST, futures tracking the Dow Jones Industrials were falling by 239 points to 33,724.0, those on the S&P 500 by 38.0 points to 4,248.50 and those for the Nasdad-100 by 138.25 points to 13,385.0.

West Texas Intermediate crude oil futures were off by nearly 2% to $88.98 a barrel on the ICE and 10-year US Treasury yields were up by eight basis points at 2.963%.

Bitcoin was plummeting by 9.05% to $21,338.61 alongside and the US dollar index was adding half a per cent to 108.02.

In the background, investors and traders were digesting a smattering of Fedspeak overnight in which central bank officials had stressed the need to lower inflation.

In response, Fed funds futures had moved to fully price in another 25bp interest rate hike for December's policy meeting which would take the target range for the Fed funds rate to 3.50-3.75%.

However, the odds attached to a 75bp at their September meeting was still being put at around 50-50.

Enter BofA Securities strategists Michael Hartnett and Myung-Jee Jung, who poured cold water on the notion that the Fed might be near to being done.



"[The] last time Fed ended hiking cycle with negative real rates was 1954 & even assuming CPI gains halve next 6 months inflation 5-6% next spring; whether Fed knows or not, they're nowhere near done."

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