Stock Market Reaction to FOMC Meeting Minutes Releases

Does the U.S. stock market reliably exhibit extreme behavior on days (mid-afternoon) when the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of the Federal Reserve Board issues its meeting minutes? Might the minutes be systematically encouraging, discouraging, calming or exciting? Using release dates for these minutes and contemporaneous daily open, high, low and close levels of the S&P 500 Index during January 2000 through mid-March 2022 (177 release dates), plus three samples of SPY five-minute prices for 9:30-16:oo from 2005-2006 , 2007-2008 and August 2012-July 2013 (see “Intraday U.S. Stock Market Behavior” and “Recent Intraday U.S. Stock Market Behavior”), we find that:

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