FOMC day explained: the statement, the projections and the press conference

The Federal Open Market Committee meets eight times a year. The statement is published at 14:00 Eastern on the second day of each meeting, and the chair's press conference begins at 14:30. Four of the eight meetings — March, June, September and December — also publish the Summary of Economic Projections, which contains the dot plot.

The structure of the afternoon is why FOMC days behave unlike any other scheduled release: there are two distinct information events thirty minutes apart, and the market regularly moves one way on the first and the other way on the second.

The decision is rarely the news

By the time the statement lands, rate futures and prediction markets have usually converged on a single outcome, frequently at odds above 90%. When a decision is that heavily priced, the decision itself carries little information — the repricing happened over the preceding weeks. What remains unpriced is the guidance: which sentences changed from the previous statement, whether anyone dissented, and how the committee characterised the balance of risks.

This is where the redline reading matters. Traders compare the new statement with the previous one word by word, and a handful of changed words — an adjective about inflation, a removed or added clause about future adjustments — is what moves the curve in the first minute. The mechanism is the same as any other event: the market trades the delta from expectations, and the expectation here is the previous statement.

The dot plot, four times a year

The Summary of Economic Projections includes each participant's view of the appropriate policy rate at the end of the next few years, plotted as anonymous dots. The market reads the median, and the change in the median from the previous projection is what gets traded.

• The median dot for the current year is the headline number.
• A shift of one dot can move the median, which is why the reaction can look disproportionate.
• The dots are individual projections, not a committee decision or a commitment.
• The longer-run dot is a view about the neutral rate and moves rarely, but matters greatly when it does.

The most common misreading is to treat the dot plot as a plan. It is a snapshot of individual expectations conditional on each participant's own forecast, published quarterly and routinely superseded by data within weeks. It shifts the distribution of expectations; it does not fix the path.

Why the press conference so often reverses the statement move

The 14:00 move is a reaction to a written document parsed largely by machines. The 14:30 conference is unscripted question-and-answer, and a single clarifying sentence can undo the initial interpretation. This is the origin of the well-known FOMC-day pattern: a sharp directional move at 14:00, a partial or complete reversal between 14:30 and 15:15, and a third move into the close as positioning settles.

Practically, this means an FOMC afternoon offers at least two distinct decision points and a considerable chance of being stopped out of a correct view by the first one. Traders who intend to hold through both frequently size for the round trip rather than for a single move — the arithmetic in position sizing is what makes that survivable rather than optimistic.

Using the odds beforehand

Rate futures and prediction markets both express the decision as a probability, and comparing them with what your own instrument implies is the most direct way to tell whether an outcome is genuinely priced. If the market assigns 92% to one outcome, the repricing risk sits almost entirely in the 8%, and the size of the move on that branch is proportionately larger. How to read prediction-market odds covers the conversion and the traps.

An FOMC checklist

1. Note whether this meeting includes projections. Four of the eight do.
2. Record what is priced beforehand, from rate futures or an event market.
3. Read the statement against the previous one, not on its own.
4. Check the vote for dissents before reacting to the language.
5. Expect two moves. Decide in advance whether you are trading the first, the second, or neither.

The wider process for scheduled events — regime, revisions, and the decision to stand aside — is in how to use an economic calendar, and the inflation data the committee is reacting to is covered in what happens to markets on CPI day. The Forecandle console scores the statement and the press-conference headlines as they land and maps them to the assets they touch, which is a faster way through an FOMC afternoon than four terminals and a live stream.