On Tuesday (November 6, 2024), U.S. stocks rallied as voters headed to the polls on the last day of the presidential election and as more data piled up showing the economy remains solid.

The S&P 500 rose 1.2% to pull closer to its record set last month. The Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 427 points, or 1%, while the Nasdaq composite gained 1.4%.

Also Read: U.S. Elections 2024 voting LIVE: Donald Trump wins Florida, leads over Kamala Harris as early polls close

The market’s main event was the election, even if the result may not be known for days or weeks as officials count all the votes. Such uncertainty could upset markets, along with an upcoming meeting by the Federal Reserve on interest rates later this week. The widespread expectation is for it to cut its main interest rate for a second straight time.

Investors have already made moves in anticipation of a win by either former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris. But Paul Christopher, head of global investment strategy at Wells Fargo Investment Institute, suggests not getting caught up in such pre-election moves, or even those immediately after the polls close, “which we believe will face inevitable tempering, if not outright reversals, either before or after Inauguration Day.”

The Dow and S&P 500 futures were up slightly, while the Nasdaq futures were unchanged as of 7:27 p.m. Eastern time, as several states on the East Coast closed polls and early returns began coming in.

In Asia, some benchmarks were moving higher in early trading Wednesday (November 7, 2024). The Nikkei 225 in Tokyo was 0.7% higher, while the Kospi in Seoul was up 0.5%. Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 added 0.8%.

Trump Media & Technology Group, the company behind the former president’s Truth Social platform, tumbled 20% in after-hours trading. It closed 1.2% lower during the regular session, when trading in the stock was halted multiple times due to volatility. The stock, which tends to move more with Mr. Trump’s re-election odds than on its own profit prospects, rallied strongly last month.

Despite all the uncertainty heading into the final day of voting, many professional investors suggest keeping the focus on the long term. The broad U.S. stock market has historically tended to rise regardless of which party wins the White House, even if each party’s policies can help and hurt different industries’ profits.

Since 1945, the S&P 500 has risen in 73% of the years where a Democrat was president and 70% of the years when a Republican was the nation’s chief executive, according to Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at CFRA.

The U.S. stock market has risen more in magnitude when Democrats have been president, in part because a loss under George W. Bush’s term hurt the Republicans’ average. Mr. Bush took over as the dot-com bubble was deflating and exited office when the 2008 global financial crisis and Great Recession were devastating markets.

Besides whom will be president, other questions hanging over the market include whether the White House will be working with a unified Congress or one split by political parties, as well as whether the results will be contested.

The general hope among investors is often for split control of the U.S. government because that’s more likely to keep the status quo and avoid big changes that could drive the nation’s debt much, much higher.

As for a contested election, Wall Street has some precedent to look back to. In 2000, the S&P 500 dropped 5% in about five weeks after Election Day before Al Gore conceded to George W. Bush. That, though, also happened during the near-halving of the S&P 500 from March 2000 to October 2002 as the dot-com bubble deflated.

Four years ago, the S&P 500 rose the day after polls closed, even though a winner wasn’t yet clear. And it kept going higher after Mr. Trump refused to concede and challenged the results, which created plenty of uncertainty. A large part of that rally was due to excitement about the potential for a vaccine for COVID-19, which had just shut down the global economy.

The S&P 500 ended up rising 69.6% from Election Day 2020 through Monday (November 5, 2024), following President Joe Biden’s win. It rallied to records as the U.S. economy bounced back from the COVID-19 pandemic and managed to avoid a recession despite a jump in inflation.

In the four years before that, the S&P 500 rose 57.5% from Election Day 2016 through Election Day 2020, in part because of cuts to tax rates signed by Mr. Trump.

On Tuesday (November 6, 2024), excitement about the artificial-intelligence boom helped lift Wall Street following a strong profit report from Palantir Technologies. So did a report showing growth accelerated last month for U.S. services businesses, beating economists’ expectations for a slowdown.

The Institute for Supply Management said it was the strongest growth in more than two years. The report offered more hope that the U.S. economy will remain solid and avoid a long-feared recession following the worst inflation in generations.

Palantir jumped 23.5%. CEO Alexander Karp said, “We absolutely eviscerated this quarter, driven by unrelenting AI demand that won’t slow down.”

All told, the S&P 500 rose 70.07 points to 5,782.76 on Tuesday (November 6, 2024). The Dow gained 427.28 to 42,221.88, and the Nasdaq composite rallied 259.19 to 18,439.17.

In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury slipped to 4.28% from 4.29% late Monday (November 5, 2024).

Until quite recently, Nvidia wasn’t much of a household name outside of Silicon Valley or Wall Street. But times clearly have changed for the Santa Clara, California-based tech company with the easily mispronounced moniker. Across a growing range of technologies and gadgets, tiny chips made by Nvidia play an outsized role in our lives. And thanks to the explosion of artificial intelligence, perhaps our future as well.

But before Nvidia became the world’s most valuable chipmaker, the $3 trillion company had a more humble calling: making graphics cards for video game consoles. In the Bloomberg Originals mini-documentary How Nvidia Changed the Game, we show how a gargantuan technology company that’s held investors in its thrall got so big seemingly overnight. 

Nvidia didn’t have a great day on Wednesday (or today for that matter)-not because its $32.5 billion revenue projection for the third quarter was somehow terrible, but rather because it didn’t blow the doors off of analyst projections. However, none of the Wall Street handwringing that’s followed diminishes the story of how the company managed to succeed thanks to an incredible bit of long-term planning.

Today, Nvidia dominates the graphics industry. But when it started back in the 1990s, it was just one of many fledgling tech companies with similar ideas. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang chose to focus on an area where there was a lot of money to be made: video games. While using the cash that tumbled in to fund Nvidia’s research and development, he leveraged the company’s accelerating chip technology to branch out to a wider range of products and sectors.

In How Nvidia Changed the Game, Bloomberg Originals shows how this strategy eventually placed Nvidia at the heart of dual revolutions in cryptocurrency and-most importantly-artificial intelligence.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

U.S., European, Japanese bond rout deepens; 10-year Treasury yields hit 16-year high above 4.88%; Wall Street mixed, Euro STOXX 600 lower

NEW YORK/LONDON A rout in government bond markets deepened early on October 4 with benchmark U.S. yields hitting fresh 16-year highs as investors bet that persistently high interest rates will slow world growth and dampen the appetite for riskier assets.

The Treasury rout later retreated on a cooler-than-expected U.S. private payrolls report that helped stocks on Wall Street rebound from a sharp sell-on October 3 that had plunged the three main U.S. equity indexes to four-month closing lows.

Growth concerns weighed on crude oil and gold prices, and European equities edged lower for a third day as retailer shares fell on a consumer spending pullback.

The bond rally, whose price moves inversely to yield, was likely short-lived, with the September unemployment report on Friday now the market’s next focus, said Kim Rupert, managing director of global fixed income at Action Economics in San Francisco.

“The sell-off has been really dramatic. It’s been rapid. It’s been huge,” Mr. Rupert said. “The market was so over-sold that it was looking for a catalyst to rally on and found it in ADP.”

Mr. Rupert referred to the ADP National Employment Report that showed U.S. private payrolls rose by 89,000 jobs in September, the smallest gain since January 2021.

The yield on 10-year Treasury notes touched 4.884%, a fresh 16-year high in early London trade, while 30-year Treasury yields rose above 5% for the first time since August 2007.

“ADP is the canary in the coal mine that things are slowing,” said Rhys Williams, chief strategist at Sprouting Rock Asset Management in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. “The upcoming job reports are going to be less robust than the previous few months.”

The market ignored a survey from the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) that showed the U.S. services sector slowing in September as new orders fell to a nine-month low. But inflation remained elevated and employment slowed only gradually 18 months after the Federal Reserve started raising rates to cool demand.

Market expectations for a rate hike in November slid to a 23.7% chance from 28.2% on Tuesday, according to CME Group’s FedWatch Tool. Futures showed the Fed’s overnight rate staying above 5% through next July, after receding from pricing on Tuesday that kept that level through September 2024.

MSCI’s U.S.-centric gauge of stocks across the globe closed up 0.23%, while the pan-European STOXX 600 index fell 0.14%.

Stocks on Wall Street rallied. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.39%, the S&P 500 gained 0.81% and the Nasdaq Composite advanced 1.35%.

European bonds followed the U.S. rout on Tuesday, with yields on Germany’s benchmark 10-year debt rising above 3% for the first time since 2011, before slipping to 2.928%. The country’s 30-year yield climbed to another 12-year high before pulling back.

Even Japan’s 10-year yield, which is capped by the Bank of Japan (BOJ), rose 4.5 bps to a decade high despite the BOJ offering to buy $4.5 billion worth of bonds on Wednesday.

Australian, Canadian and British government bond yields have also surged this week.

The moves in bond markets sucked money into the U.S. dollar, which in overnight trade was stronger than the euro. The dollar index, a measure of the U.S. currency against a basket of other currencies, eased 0.38%.

Earlier, MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan sank to 11-month lows, shedding 1.1% for its second straight daily drop of more than 1%.

U.S. yields in real terms — subtracting inflation — are also at almost 15-year highs, in part because their move has not come with much of a shift in market gauges of inflation expectations.

The Dollar’s march

The yen was on the stronger side of 150 per dollar on October 4, after an unexpected but short-lived surge in the previous session stoked speculation that Japanese authorities may have intervened to support the currency.

The Japanese currency had breached the 150-per-dollar level on October 3 before suddenly shooting to 147.3. There was no confirmation from Tokyo, where Japan’s finance minister and top currency diplomat have made no direct comment on the move.

The yen last stood at 149.01 per dollar.

The dollar’s march pushed the euro to its lowest in 10 months at $1.0448 overnight and sterling to a seven-month trough at $1.20535.

The euro last traded at $1.18, up 0.5% on the day. The pound was up a similar amount at $1.212.

“For now, the FX market is a bystander,” said SocGen strategist Kit Juckes, “watching Treasuries and waiting for them to break something.”

Fed officials see rising yields on long-term U.S. Treasury debt as not triggering alarm bells yet.

Oil prices tumbled by more than 5% following reports that Russia may lift its diesel ban in coming days and U.S. government data that indicated weak demand for gasoline.

U.S. crude futures fell $5.01 to settle at $84.22 a barrel, while Brent settled down $5.11 at $85.81.

Gold prices crept lower for the eighth consecutive session as elevated Treasury yields amid expectations that the Fed will keep rates higher for longer weighed on investor sentiment.

U.S. gold futures settled 0.4% lower at $1,834.80 an ounce.