With Brad Hoppmann

Bar color is the trend reading: green is rising and strong, yellow is mixed, red is falling and weak. Bar length is posture, where 50 is neutral and 100 is fully extended. Color and length answer different questions, so a long red bar means a strong reading that has started to roll over.

The Fed raised rates Wednesday afternoon. A quarter point, to a range of 3.75% to 4%, on a 12 to 0 vote. The dollar did what a dollar does when the committee is still tightening. It went up. UUP closed at $28.40, up 0.64%, its highest close since late July. Our Supercycle Score is nothing more than the mirror of that move, so it fell from 17 to 9 out of 100. That is still Strong Headwind, but only a few points above the band we call Ludicrous.

Look at what the hike did to the rest of the board. Yesterday crude oil was the one green light in the room, up 3.3%. Today it gave all of that back and then some, down 3.5%, the worst mover on the board. Palladium fell 2%, natural gas 1.7%, platinum 1.5%. Nine of the twelve instruments closed lower. The dollar now owns the only green trend reading on the whole board, and on this board a green dollar is not good news. It is the headwind itself.

Here is the part worth slowing down for. Gold and silver each gave up less than a percent on a rate-hike day. That is not a rout. That is closer to quiet resistance. Jim Rogers would tell you to stop reading about the thing and go look at the thing, and the thing says barrels got sold much harder than metal did. Their trend readings are cool, with gold's posture at 20 and silver's at 18, both well off the highs they carried in May. Price soft and posture soft at the same time is what the inside of a shakeout looks like. Richard Dennis built the Turtles around not being the one who flinches first.

What to watch: the dot plot released with the decision showed 16 of the 18 participants expecting at least one more increase before year end, with year-end projections between 4.1% and 4.4%. If the market starts believing that, the dollar clears its 52-week high and this Score goes to Ludicrous. If the market decides Wednesday was the last easy hike, then this is roughly where the headwind peaks. Watch the dollar's closing price, not the volume of the argument about it.

The dollar event is no longer on the calendar. It happened. The Federal Open Market Committee raised the target range for the federal funds rate by a quarter point to 3.75% to 4%, on a unanimous 12 to 0 vote, and released a fresh Summary of Economic Projections at the same time. The statement described economic activity expanding at a solid pace, with job gains keeping up with the workforce and inflation still elevated. The projections showed a strong majority of officials penciling in at least one more increase this year.

Our Treasury numbers are one session behind the decision, so read them as the setup rather than the reaction. As of the September 15 close, the day before the Fed moved, the 2-year sat at 4.67%, the 10-year at 5.00%, and the 30-year at 5.36%. That puts the 2s10s spread near positive 33 basis points, and it puts the 10-year right on a round number that tends to attract attention. Whatever the long end did after 2 p.m. Wednesday is not in these figures yet. We will pick that up tomorrow rather than guess at it today.

Next on the calendar: the October Consumer Price Index print, then the Fed's next meeting at the end of October. Between now and then the dollar has to decide whether Wednesday was the start of something or the top of it. That single decision is worth more to this board than any other item on the docket.

Positioning data from the weekly Commitment of Traders report is not yet part of this letter. The next scheduled release is tomorrow, Friday, September 18, 2026, and it covers positions as of Tuesday. That is the day before the Fed moved, so tomorrow's file will show you how the big players were set up going into the hike, not how they reacted to it. The first report that captures the reaction will not land until the following Friday. Keep that in mind when you read the weekend commentary.

The city of Titusville is closing the boat ramp and the dock at Fox Lake Park on Monday. They are tearing the old dock out and building a new one, and they do not expect to be done until the end of December. Three months. No trailer, no backing the truck down the concrete. The canoe and kayak launch stays open the whole time.

I keep thinking that is the cleanest picture anybody drew this week of what the Fed did Wednesday afternoon. Nobody drained Fox Lake. The water is exactly where it was on Tuesday, same depth, same fish, same afternoon thunderstorm rolling in off the river at four o'clock. What closed was the easy way in, the one where you back a trailer down a slab and let the boat float off by itself. If you still want to be out there between now and Christmas, you carry something smaller down to the sand and you paddle. A quarter point on the funds rate is that same kind of closure. The commodity supercycle did not get canceled Wednesday. The ramp got closed for repairs.

By dinnertime one channel had the hike as proof the grown-ups are finally back in charge of inflation, and the other had it as proof somebody just put a boot on the neck of a perfectly good expansion. Same quarter point. Same 12 to 0 vote. Neither one mentioned Fox Lake, and neither one is going to help you decide what to do this morning. Around here, the people who actually fish a lake do not spend three months arguing about whether the ramp should have closed. They look at the calendar, count to December, and go find the kayak.

The ramp is closed, not the lake. See you tomorrow.

If you want to chart the dollar's lone green trend reading yourself, Golden Terminal's CCI & Golden Thread study is built to read exactly this kind of shift. See it at https://goldenterminal.com.

Score footnote: the Supercycle Score is the inverse of the US dollar. UUP closed at $28.40, which sits at roughly 91% of its 52-week weekly range, low $26.40 and high $28.60. A dollar that high in its own range scores 9 out of 100.

Data sources: the Board and the dollar range are built from daily OHLC bars for liquid ETF proxies (UUP, GLD, SLV, CPER, USO, UNG, CORN, SOYB, PALL, PPLT, QQQ, SPY) through the September 16, 2026 close. Trend color and posture use 54 actual daily bars per instrument, with no estimated or filled values. Treasury yields come from a separate provider and reflect the September 15, 2026 close, one session before the Fed decision. Native futures price levels were not available on the current data plan, so the prices shown are ETF proxy closes. Fed decision details are drawn from the FOMC statement and projections released September 16, 2026.

The Daily Dashboard is an educational publication. Nothing here is personalized investment advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell any security.