Kevin Warsh Is Fed Chair. Here’s What History Says Advisors Should Tell Clients Next.

When a new Federal Reserve Chair leads a first policy meeting, clients often hear the headline before they understand the history.

They may ask:

• Will the market sell off?
• Will stocks rally?
• Does a new Fed Chair change the direction of the S&P 500?

Those are fair questions. But they are also dangerous questions if advisors answer them with narrative alone.

The better approach is to start with base rates.

What actually happened after prior Fed Chairs led their first Federal Open Market Committee meeting? How did the S&P 500 perform one week later, one month later, three months later, and six months later?

That is exactly the type of question a Registered Investment Advisor can use DeepVest to answer quickly. The goal is not to predict the market. The goal is to help advisors move from headlines to history, from opinion to evidence, and from client anxiety to a grounded conversation.

Manually, an advisor would need to spend hours confirming each Fed Chair’s first FOMC date, pull S&P 500 data, calculate four forward return windows, isolate the Greenspan/Black Monday outlier, and turn the results into client-ready talking points. DeepVest compresses that workflow into one research process: historical data, table, context, caveats, and advisor language in one place that you can get within minutes.

This Is What We Asked DeepVest

“Kevin Warsh is the new Fed Chair. To help RIAs separate market narrative from historical base rates, analyze what happened to the S&P 500 Index (SPX) after each modern Fed Chair’s first FOMC meeting as Chair. Build a table showing the Fed Chair, first meeting date, policy signal, average S&P 500 return after 1 week, 1 month, 3 months, and 6 months. Then explain what this history suggests advisors should tell clients about Kevin Warsh as Fed Chair, without making any investment recommendation.”

DeepVest AgentLab’s Response

Based on the research, the confirmed first FOMC meeting dates as Chair are:

• Greenspan: 1987-09-22
• Bernanke: 2006-03-28
• Yellen: 2014-03-19
• Powell: 2018-03-21
• Warsh: 2026-06-17 (too recent for meaningful forward windows)

S&P 500 Performance After Each Modern Fed Chair’s First FOMC Meeting

Methodology note: Each window is measured from the day of the first FOMC meeting presided over by that Chair. Greenspan’s first meeting was September 22, 1987 — just 27 days before Black Monday (October 19, 1987), which dominates his short-horizon numbers. All returns are price returns on ^GSPC. Warsh’s first meeting (June 17, 2026) has only 2 trading days of post-event data as of today; forward windows are not yet available.

Per-Chair Results Table

Cross-Chair Averages (Greenspan through Powell, 4 events)

Important Context: Greenspan’s Outlier Effect

Greenspan’s numbers are heavily distorted by Black Monday (October 19, 1987), which occurred 27 days after his first meeting. Excluding Greenspan and looking only at the three most recent transitions:

Schedule a demo with DeepVest to see how our platform helps RIAs turn market questions into client-ready research, historical analysis, and practical advisor talking points.

What This History Suggests Advisors Should Communicate to Clients

• The first meeting is a signal event, not a market-moving event by itself. Across the four prior transitions, the 1-week return averaged -0.68% and ranged from -3.94% (Powell) to +0.98% (Bernanke). The market’s immediate reaction to a new Chair’s first meeting has been modest and directionally inconsistent. Warsh’s first two trading days (+1.08%) are within that historical range.
• The 1-month window carries the most noise. The 1-month average is -5.59%, but that figure is almost entirely explained by Black Monday in 1987. The three-chair average (Bernanke, Yellen, Powell) at 1 month is essentially flat at -0.01%. Clients who see short-term volatility after a Chair transition should understand that the historical base rate does not support a directional conclusion at that horizon.
• The 6-month window has been consistently positive in the three most recent transitions. Bernanke (+1.67%), Yellen (+6.63%), and Powell (+6.52%) all produced positive 6-month returns after their first meeting. The 3-chair average is +4.94%. This does not mean Warsh will replicate that pattern — each transition occurred in a different macro regime — but it does mean that the narrative of “new Fed Chair = market disruption” is not supported by the post-2006 record.
• Policy signal at the first meeting has not been a reliable predictor of direction. Bernanke and Powell both hiked at their first meeting; their 6-month outcomes were +1.67% and +6.52% respectively. Yellen held and guided dovishly; her 6-month outcome was +6.63%. Warsh held at 3.50-3.75% with a “wait-and-see” posture and announced a sweeping policy review. The data does not establish a link between the first-meeting policy action and subsequent market direction.
• The Greenspan precedent is the cautionary tail risk, not the base case. Greenspan’s -22.30% at 1 month and -15.14% at 6 months are outliers driven by an exogenous crash, not by his chairmanship itself. Advisors should acknowledge this tail exists in the historical record without implying it is the expected outcome.
• What is genuinely new with Warsh: the forward-guidance posture. The search results confirm Warsh has signaled he intends to reduce the Fed’s reliance on forward guidance — a structural change in how the Fed communicates. Prior Chairs (Bernanke, Yellen, Powell) all operated within a forward-guidance framework. This means the historical pattern of markets “pricing in” Fed signals well in advance may be less applicable going forward. Advisors should communicate to clients that the uncertainty premium around Fed meetings may be higher under Warsh than it was under his predecessors, not because of any directional view on rates, but because the communication style itself is changing.
• The sample is four events. Advisors should be explicit with clients that four data points spanning 39 years, across radically different macro environments (1987 pre-crash, 2006 mid-cycle expansion, 2014 post-GFC recovery, 2018 late-cycle tightening), do not constitute a statistically robust base rate. The table above is useful for grounding client conversations in historical context, not for generating return forecasts.

Advisor Takeaway

The key message for RIAs is simple.

A new Fed Chair’s first meeting may dominate headlines, but the historical market signal is mixed. One week and one month returns have been noisy. Six-month returns were positive in the three most recent transitions, but the sample is too small to treat as a forecast.

That is the value of historical research workflows in DeepVest.

It gives advisors a way to answer client questions with data, context, and humility. Not “stocks will go up.” Not “stocks will go down.” But:

“Here is what happened before, here is what is different now, and here is how we should think about it.”

That is the market intelligence clients need from advisors.

Schedule a demo with DeepVest to see how our platform helps advisors prepare for client meetings, analyze portfolios, and turn complex questions into clearer conversations.

For questions, contact: [email protected].