Why stocks jumped after Trump’s election

Stocks reacted strongly to the news that Donald Trump won the presidential election. The S&P 500 closed up 2.5% Wednesday. The Russell 2000 index, comprising smaller companies, gained 5.8%. Meanwhile, bond prices fell and yields shot up. 

In large part, the market jumped for a pretty simple reason.

“One of the main proposals that Donald Trump made while on the campaign trail was that he was going to cut the corporate income tax rate,” said David Kelly, chief global strategist for J.P. Morgan Asset Management.

Business tax cuts are good for corporate earnings. Then there’s the VIX, a measure of market volatility and/or fear. Early Wednesday, it was down more than 20%.

“There was a fear of instability,” said Raphael Duguay at the Yale School of Management. “That we might end up with an ambiguous result, and that result might get challenged. We might end up with riots, you name it. And what we’re seeing this morning is that the results are quite clear.”

So, fear gone, volatility down. Meanwhile, the bond market had a different fear that has not gone away.

“Every person who invests in bonds, it’s the first thing they want to talk about is the debt and the deficits,” said Rick Rieder, chief investment officer of global fixed income at BlackRock.

To pay for promised tax cuts, the government may have to borrow trillions in the bond market. “All of that has pushed people to say, ‘Gosh, if we’re going to issue this much debt in the marketplace, we need to be at a higher yield to absorb it,” Rieder said.

So bond yields went up proactively. Over in the world of cryptocurrency, there were winners — bitcoin popped up almost 7% just on Tuesday night.

“Trump was very clear on his support for bitcoin,” said Hany Rashwan, CEO of 21Shares, which sells crypto exchange-traded funds. “Trump himself has a lending application called World Liberty Financial that itself is built on crypto.”

In the loser column is the solar industry. Solar stocks fell by double digits in the morning.

“The new Trump administration does present risks to a lot of the different incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act that would support a lot of these industries,” said Michelle Davis, head of solar research at Wood Mackenzie.

Of course, election uncertainty has now been replaced by policy uncertainty. A lot will depend on how many campaign trail promises make it into reality.