The S&P 500's recent performance is indeed impressive - just 0.5% away from its all-time peak in October, and with the seasonality of the year-end market, many people have begun to look forward to the Christmas rally. The script that the market generally bets on is beautiful: cooling inflation, falling interest rates, and a soft landing for the economy, with triple positive superpositions.

But the strategy team of a leading investment bank poured cold water. Their chief strategist Michael Hartnett bluntly said that the real risk may be hidden precisely where everyone is most looking forward to it - if next week's interest rate meeting releases a clear dovish signal, it may break the current optimism.

This logic sounds quite counterintuitive at first glance. Isn't it good for interest rate cut expectations to increase? The key is "why cut interest rates". If central banks suddenly become particularly dovish, it often means they are seeing signs of economic weakness that some markets are not fully pricing in. In this case, instead of reassuring, easing will trigger panic pricing of "how bad the economy is".

Hartnett's team specifically named a transmission path: dovish turn→ long-term bonds sold off→ yield curve distortion→ stock market valuations under pressure. Once this link is launched, the fairy tale of the rebound at the end of the year may not be able to continue.

Even more troublesome is the time window. Employment and inflation data, which were supposed to be released in late December, will be postponed for some administrative reasons. The market has to bear two major uncertainties during the information vacuum period, which is not very friendly to risk appetite.

But there are also coping ideas. The investment bank suggests that if you are really worried about policy intervention ( such as ), you can lay out some undervalued mid-cap stocks in advance in 2026. After all, under the expectation of policy support, the resilience of such assets is often stronger.

In the end, the biggest paradox of the current market is that good news can be bad news, and bad news can also be good news. Everything depends on what the Fed says and does next week.