Americans woke up Wednesday to president-elect Donald Trump. The U.S. stock markets opened at 9:30 a.m. ET today — by 9:35 a.m. ET, they were headed downward. Five minutes later, that direction shifted. It’s been wash, rinse, repeat since then.
You get the point– no one knows what to do with the political news that very few predicted. At least the markets’ wavering wasn’t an outright nosedive like last night.
Below are snapshots of where the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 stand after a half-hour of regular trading today. At the time of publishing this post, neither was up even one-third of one percent, but anyone with investments will take whatever points they can get. Holding on to them is a whole other story.
At 10 a.m. ET, the NASDAQ was up 5.82 points (that’s +0.11 percent) to 5199.31.
Around midnight ET on Tuesday, the U.S. markets dropped hard pre-market when it became likely that Trump would win the White House. Fortunately, they would mostly recover by the early morning hours — though not fully.
Dow futures, the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ all sunk about 5 percent, triggering an automatic halt on sales — a failsafe, essentially. The Dow had fallen more than 800 points, the S&P fell more than 100 points, and the NASDAQ dipped to around 4,500.
The global reaction was even less favorable. The Mexican peso tanked by more than 10 percent on currency exchanges, trading at an all-time low for a little while. Trump made illegal immigration a centerpiece of his White House run and vowed to make Mexico pay for a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Asian indexes, meanwhile, began to absorb the U.S. election news as their Wednesday trading day began. Major indexes sank by more than 2 percent; Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was down by more than 3 percent. Trump has attacked China repeatedly over its trade and currency policies and promised better trade deals for America.
Markets can have very short memories about vote results, though.
Earlier this year, the surprise Brexit vote — which began the process of Great Britain leaving the European Union — sent the British pound to 30-year lows. But the markets have since rebounded.