The Federal Reserve decision on whether to raise interest rates by .25% happens Thursday afternoon on the East Coast. Meanwhile, traders are quietly selling out of speculative issues and raising cash, to be ready for whatever happens.

Stocks went down to nearly their closing price within the first half-hour of trading, then bounced up-and-down from there all day. On the day the Dow (INDEX:DJI) was down 62.13 or .38% to finish at 16,371, the S&P (INDEX:SPX) was down 8.02 or .41% to finish at 1,953, and the Nasdaq (INDEX:COMP) was down 16.58 or .34% to finish at 4,806.

Most of the big tech stocks fell about 1%, including Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), IBM (NYSE:IBM) and Oracle (NYSE:ORCL). An exception was Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), which finished up almost 1% after telling investors that demand for its new iPhone 6s phones is strong.

Tesla Gets a Boost

It wasn’t all bad news. Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) rose 1.18%, or $2.95 per share, to finish at $253.19. The move was purely speculative. Most of the news around the stock was bad, about German and Chinese automakers gunning for it, and Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) hiring a former Audi executive, Jeff Krafcik, to run its self-driving car efforts. Krafcik’s most recent job was at TrueCar, a Web site that claims to find accurate prices on used cars.

The only theory that makes sense, other than the Los Angeles cops buying some Tesla police cars, is that the moves by rivals, taken together, represent validation for the ideas of electric and self-driving vehicles, and an acknowledgement that Tesla now leads in the former category.

Currencies and Oil

The dollar mostly drifted, losing .14% against the Euro, .34% against the Japanese Yen, .02% against the British pound and even .06% against the Canadian dollar.