FOMC minutes: the detailed record three weeks after the decision

What the minutes contain

The minutes summarize the whole meeting: developments in financial markets and the balance sheet, the staff's economic outlook, each part of the policy discussion and the final decision. They do not name individuals. Instead they describe how widely a view was shared, using quantifiers such as all, most, many, several, some and a few participants.

Those quantifiers are what the market parses. A line saying that many participants saw a certain risk carries a different weight from one attributed to a few. Participants include all Reserve Bank presidents, not only those who vote that year.

Why a three-week-old meeting moves futures

• The press conference presents the Chair's view; the minutes show the spread of views behind it. A more divided Committee than the Chair suggested can shift the expected path of rates.
• Discussions of options not taken, such as a different pace of balance sheet runoff, can surface for the first time.
• Data released since the meeting may already have changed expectations, so the minutes matter most when they speak to the question the market is currently debating.
• Reactions are usually smaller than on decision day, because most of the information is already known.

Order flow at 2:00 p.m. on minutes day

Minutes are released as a document at a fixed time, so the pre-release pattern resembles a data release: resting liquidity near the inside steps back briefly, then the first reaction arrives as the first paragraphs are parsed by readers and machines. Because the document is long, the reaction can unfold over several minutes rather than in one burst.

The typical footprint is less dramatic than on decision day: a release bar with more volume than its neighbours, sometimes a sweep of a few levels, then either rotation back into the prior range or a slow drift as the text is read. A small release bar followed by an unchanged afternoon auction is a common outcome and is itself information: the minutes did not change the view.

In Senzoukria

In the News calendar, when the minutes row name includes FOMC, its one-line description is the generic “Fed policy decision — primary market driver.”, the first matching rule; the row title itself tells you it is the minutes, not a decision. The countdown on the row appears within twelve hours of the release.

On the footprint, the Big Trades overlay draws large executions as bubbles, merged over a 100 ms window at the same price and side by default; a cluster of bubbles at 1:00 p.m. CT shows where size went through when the text came out. The Stacked Imbalances overlay marks runs of consecutive levels where one side dominated, which helps identify whether the release bar was a genuine one-sided move.