US stocks closed at a record high on Wednesday when Joe Biden was sworn in as 46th president – with the new commander-in-chief setting a record for stock gains between his election and his inauguration.
The S&P 500 benchmark rose to finish 14 percent higher on inauguration day than on election day, breaking a record set by President Hoover in 1928, when the S&P rose 13.3 percent during the same interval, from according to MarketWatch.
Biden will spend little time turning the page on the Trump era, advisers said, signing 15 executive actions in the afternoon on issues ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic to the economy and climate change.
“I’m not sure the opening day policy did much, but certainly the expectation of another trillion in stimulus,” said Ross Mayfield, investment strategy analyst at Baird, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
The Dow gained about 57 percent and the S&P 500 has advanced about 68 percent since Donald Trump took office on January 20, 2017, which compares to a 65 percent jump in the Dow and 75 percent. gain in S&P during the first term of the Obama Administration.
The main Wall Street indices have reached record highs in recent months, with the Dow blue-chip jumping about 13 percent since the presidential elections in November, with investors betting on a strong economic recovery in 2021 with the launch of the vaccine COVID- 19 and a larger pandemic relief plan.
Shares in the world’s largest streaming service, Netflix, skyrocketed on Wednesday after the company announced it would no longer need to borrow billions of dollars to fund its TV shows and movies.
The rest of the FAANG group took a leap with earnings results due in the coming weeks. The NYSE FANG + TM index also rose.
“It is a day of superior performance in technology, which is very rare in the last two or three months, as the cyclical rotation started,” said Mayfield.
Almost all of the 11 main S&P sectors advanced in the afternoon trade, with communication services, discretionary consumption and technology among the biggest winners.
Completing the results of the main creditors in the United States, Morgan Stanley fell despite having recorded quarterly profit that exceeded the estimates driven by the strength of its trading businesses.
With stock market valuations close to 20-year highs, investors hope that corporate results and profit prospects will help them determine the extent to which 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 gained 52.94 points, or 1.39 percent, to 3,851.85 and the Nasdaq Composite added 260.07 points, or 1.97 percent, to 13,457.25.
With Reuters