Welcome to closing bell. I'm Leslie Picker in for Scott Wapner. Today, live from post nine at the New York Stock Exchange. This make or break hour starts with the fate of the record rally. Stocks pulling back slightly from all-time highs as investors gear up for tomorrow's critical Fed decision on rates. Today's stronger than expected retail sales failing to juice the rally as traders hunkered

down ahead of the Fed. Here's the scorecard with 60 minutes to go in the trading session.

Stocks mostly flat across the board. You see a little bit of lower moves in the Dow down about 0.2%

at this point in time with the S&P and NASDAQ.

Little changed at this hour. Energy, the leading sector right now, followed by consumer discretionary and staples,

while rate sensitive parts of the market like tech, real estate and utilities are all in the red,

which takes us to our talk of the tape. How should you position your money

heading into tomorrow's high-stakes Fed decision? Let's ask CNBC contributor Adam Parker, founder

and CEO of Trivariate Research. Adam, this is the question of the day, really. If you want

to do some sort of portfolio reallocation ahead of tomorrow's meeting now would be kind of the time. You've got an hour? You've been in the morning to do it. Do you think investors should be repositioning or is most of tomorrow's meeting priced in already? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, some people think they do 50 bibs, something they do 25. I think they do nothing. That'd be a little surprise to most. But if you take a step back and you run a big pile of money and you don't move stuff around between 301 and four, right? I mean, I think the distribution of outcomes to the Fed is going to be more dovish over the next year, right? And I think you still can dream.

Margins are expanding for a lot of U.S. equities, right? They're going to start implementing AI as they predict their employee and customer behavior better.

So if all of equity investing is a little bit like perceptions about growth and perceptions about rates, they're both pointing toward a bullish outlook.

And I think that's why the market's basically near highs.

And I think that's why people are still, you know, risk-wort positive on the market.

I think a lot of it depends on if they are cutting, and that's the assumption based on the markets right now.

Are they cutting into an economy that is actually weakening? are they cutting into an economy that is actually weakening?

Are they cutting into an economy that is somewhat stable and therefore are there different outcomes

based on the macro backdrop by which they are cutting?

I mean, I think if you said, hey, Adam, go away, do all the analytics your team can do,

come back and tell me the state of the U.S. consumer.

I think the answer is it's in pretty good shape in absolute terms, but slightly eroding. You saw pretty good retail sales print today, but there's no question employment data has been weak. The last few prints, if you really take a step back, new hires out of college, grad school, etc. The low end's been struggling. But I think the consumer's in decent, absolute shape, slightly eroding. And I think that's the same for the economy. If you look at kind of the nominal GDP versus where we were a couple years ago. But, you know, the S&P 500 can be separate from the economy. We know that. I mean, it's a superior set of assets, record margins for a number of companies. And that's why the market's near records, because the profits are.

So I think you still want to be bullish, whatever the Fed does tomorrow.

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