U.S. stocks closed at a record high on Wednesday when Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th president – with the new commander-in-chief setting a record for stock gains between his election and his inauguration.
The benchmark of the S&P 500 index ended 14 percent higher on the day of the inauguration than on election day. This, according to MarketWatch, brought a record set in 1928 by President Hoover in 1928.
Biden will waste little time flipping through the Trump era, assistants said, signing 15 afternoon management actions this afternoon on issues ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic to the economy to climate change.
“I’m not sure the politics of the inauguration day did much, but certainly the expectation of a trillion plus stimulus,” said Ross Mayfield, investment strategy analyst at Baird, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
The Dow has gained about 57 percent and the S&P 500 has advanced about 68 percent since Donald Trump took office on January 20, 2017, which can be compared to a 65 percent jump in the Dow and a 75 percent gain in the Dow. S&P during the first term of the Obama administration.
Wall Street’s major indices have scaled record highs in recent months, with the Dow slipping Dow by about 13 percent since the November presidential election as investors recovered strongly in 2021 as a result of the deployment of COVID-19 and ‘ a larger emergency plan for pandemic.
Shares of the world’s largest streaming service Netflix rose on Wednesday after they said they would no longer have to borrow billions of dollars to fund its TV shows and movies.
The rest of the FAANG group all jumped with the results that would be in the coming weeks. The NYSE FANG + TM index also rose.
“This is a technological achievement day that has been pretty rare during the last two or three months, since the cyclical rotation is so ongoing,” Mayfield said.
Nearly all of the 11 major S&P sectors made progress in afternoon trading, with communications services, discretionary consumers and technology among the biggest gains.
Morgan Stanley locked up the results of major US credit providers, although it made a quarterly profit driven by estimates driven by strong trading.
As stock market valuations are nearly 20 years high, investors hope corporate results and profit prospects will help them determine the extent to which the valuations are justified.
Unofficially, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 257.86 points, or 0.83 percent, to 31,188.38, the S&P 500 rose 52.94 points, or 1.39 percent, to 3,851.85, and the Nasdaq Composite rose. 260.07 points, or 1.97 percent, added to 13,457.25.
With Reuters