Blessed are they who expect nothing during holiday weeks, for they shall not be disappointed.

Excess supply weighed on crude oil prices and that drove West Texas Intermediate down more than 3.30% and Brent North Sea just a touch more. (Brent is still trading below the Texas black gold, by the way.)

It’s no surprise that on this half day of trading before Christmas, U.S. equities barely moved. The biggest change was in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which was down a bit more than 0.25%. About the only market trading higher on the day was gold.

Crude oil bounced up today, surprising everyone with its strength. That buoyed U.S. and European equities.

In a not-wholly-unexpected development, Brent North Sea crude and West Texas Intermediate reached effective parity on world markets today.

Nevertheless it comes as a bit of a bucket of cold water in the face. It is one of those moves you can’t quite be psychologically prepared for regardless of your experience level.

November’s Chicago Federal Reserve National Activity Index that had been predicted to rise 0.10 from the downwardly revised earlier figure of -0.17 actually dropped to -0.30.

As we concluded yesterday, now that the Federal Reserve rate hike is in the rearview mirror, analysts and traders have begun to focus on other issues.

Before getting into the meat of our look at today’s fundamentals, we have to observe one more time that karma is a force that often works strange wonders in the universe.

The Fed did what was expected and, as Ayn Rand would have it, Atlas shrugged. We have certainly had enough time to prepare both in the physical investing world and the emotional investing world. The federal funds rate rose from zero to 0.25%.

Fed jitters, or maybe it’s just a prelude to a quiet holiday season that will give analysts and investors lots of time to ponder what a small rate hike means? It will also give us lots of leisure time to ask how we (meaning the Fed) arrived at the decision to press the button on a rate liftoff.

The CPI figures were released today and gave some added encouragement to Fed hawks.

Despite a bit of U.S. dollar weakness in the face of raging volatility, gold could not muster enough strength to rise. Rather it fell sharply, down over $9.00. Silver fell almost 1.5% on the day, but platinum and palladium rallied.

(As of 3:30 in New York, the dollar and euro are even for the day.)