It’s as quiet as markets can be for the next week. 

Earnings season is mostly over. We’ve heard from the Fed and other central banks around the world about their interest rate views. Macro data is light. And stock markets are closed on Friday due to the Good Friday holiday. 

But there is always one thing to watch in a week:

Despite the market holiday, we will get some new inflation data on Friday with new Personal Consumption Expenditures, or PCE, data posting. This is a closely watched measure by many at the Fed—more so than the highly watched Consumer Price Index (CPI). While there are several differences between the two measures, a primary one is that CPI measures the change in the out-of-pocket expenditures of all urban households and the PCE index measures the change in goods and services consumed by all households, and nonprofit institutions serving households. 

I’ll be watching Core PCE (see chart below) as it is another datapoint for or against the disinflation (or lower increases in prices than before) narrative partially driving markets. Currently, it’s expected to come in at 2.8% year-over-year, which is no change from last month. Any difference from this expectation, lower or higher, could be good or bad news, respectively.

A note on the quiet:

This tends to always be a quiet part of the year, somewhat similar to what September tends to be. Companies start to go into their quiet period, where they won’t be providing any updates until Q1 earnings season starts mid-April. Macro data stays light until April 5th when we get an update on the job market. 

And this temporarily quieter time can see greater volatility and a softer market. The reason for this, I believe, is, in this case, no news is not good news. I liken it to when your significant other goes away without you and doesn’t text you back—you might start to wonder what they’ve been doing and why you haven’t heard from them. The very absence of new information allows for the market to wonder what is happening and focus more heavily on potential risks. And this is particularly true after a strong run up. What it means for an investor can be two things:

• Make sure you want to own what you are currently invested in. If it gets volatile over the next couple of weeks, you don’t want to end up panic selling from that alone, even though fundamentally, nothing may have changed.

• Simply be aware of this. There could be investments you were considering that may see a better (lower) entry point during the more quiet period, simply because of the lull in news vs. a real change in fundamentals.

For me, I like the temporary quiet. There is always so much to take in–in markets and in life. Getting quiet can be the very thing that helps you get through anything we may face. So even if the markets don’t like it, I’ll take the other side any day.