The Wall Street buying spree has begun. At 9:30 a.m., when markets opened in New York, brokers were scrambling to fill orders as fast as possible. The Dow Jones Industrial Average shot up 1,300 points, putting it on track for one of its best days ever. Trump Media & Technology Group was up 25 percent to a new all-time high, even though it had released disastrous earnings the night before. (As if anybody even read that.) GEO Group, the private prison company, rose 27 percent on the promise that the next Trump administration would jail millions of migrants and he’s got to have somewhere to put them. The dollar rose to new highs against world currencies. Brokers are calling it the Trump Trade, but the logic to it is to go absolutely wild and buy just about everything.
“America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” Trump said during his victory speech early on Wednesday morning. The tsunami of money coming into the markets portends a new financial and corporate realignment. It’s hard to overstate how different the next Trump administration will be from Biden’s. Tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Meta will no longer so much have to fear either the Justice Department or the Federal Trade Commission bringing antitrust suits to try and break them up. (Accordingly, they were all up.) Jeff Bezos, who has also been trying to get billions of dollars in government funding for his rocket company Blue Origin, seemed delighted.
Another winner? The big banks. Regulation, which the finance industry has blamed for holding back its ability to make loans, are likely to loosen significantly. Banks like JPMorgan Chase, the largest in the country, and Bank of America have been surging. On Wednesday, Reuters reported that Jamie Dimon — a perennial prospect for Treasury secretary, no matter the administration — would stay at the bank rather than join Trump’s cabinet. This is perhaps not a surprise, since he was reportedly telling friends he was voting for Harris and his wife went to Michigan to canvass for the Democrat.
And then there’s crypto. In 2016, bitcoin was worth about $700, and the election barely changed how much it was worth. Today, it’s worth about $74,000 and is ripping higher. What’s different is that the Trump of 2024 has embraced crypto and promised to make the U.S. the global center of the industry. On Wednesday morning, after it was clear that not only had he won but one of Congress’s most vocal critics of digital assets had lost his seat, BlackRock’s bitcoin ETF got $1 billion in new money in 20 minutes— even after bitcoin hit an all-time high.
But the biggest single winner is probably Elon Musk. “Oh, let me tell you, we have a new star. A star is born, Elon. Now he’s an amazing guy,” Trump said during his speech. Tesla was up 13 percent, and Musk’s personal fortune had risen to about $264 billion, according to Bloomberg. Trump winning is just unabashed great news for Musk, since Tesla is facing criminal investigations from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and Musk has been held liable for securities fraud from the Securities and Exchange Commission. Even though Trump has been campaigning against solar energy and electric vehicles — two of the industries where Musk dominates — the world’s richest man has been trying to steer Tesla into being a self-driving car company, powered by artificial intelligence, a technology that would have faced far greater government scrutiny under a Harris administration.
It doesn’t all have to make sense. Trump has vowed to cut taxes and replace them with tariffs, which would largely hit foreign food and electronics — think: Dole, Chiquita, Samsung, Walmart. Just about every economist thinks this will bring back inflation, but Wall Street — which has feared the return of higher prices during the last three years — is hardly worrying about that now. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, whom Trump has called a “bonehead,” is expected to be replaced by someone who would juice the economy with lower interest rates when his term ends in 2026. Just like in 2016 — which saw a similar spike in trading — investors are betting that Trump is going to do everything he can to make them as wildly rich as possible.
Not everything is in the green. Gold and U.S. government bonds were both getting sold off on the expectation that inflation will erode their value. “Remember, when Trump was elected in 2016, gold fell for something like 18 days in a row,” said Brent Johnson, the CEO of the financial-advisory firm Santiago Capital. By and large, though, anything that is losing money today is an outlier.
