The Federal Reserve raised interest rates in September for the first time since 2023, lifting the federal funds target range to 3.75% to 4%, and updated projections showed a strong majority of officials think another increase is possible before year-end. Retail stocks had already spent weeks trading as though that outcome would break the American shopper.
Andy Swan thinks the market is reading the wrong data set. Swan is co-founder of LikeFolio and a lead analyst at TradeSmith, where the team tracks millions of social mentions, website visits and app downloads to measure what consumers are buying in close to real time. His read is that the retail sell-off is a sentiment event rather than a demand event, and that it has handed long-term investors discounted entry points into three of the most durable consumer franchises in the United States.
