Investors showed no fear of jinxing the election result on Thursday, continuing to full-force barrel into equities on the assumption that Joe Biden will be POTUS come January.
Little has changed since this morning. Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Nevada are all still on a knife-edge, with many votes left to count, and hours, days and potentially weeks – dependent on Trump’s legal challenges – left in the whole process.
Yet, as they did on Tuesday and Wednesday, the markets have used the likelihood of a Biden presidency, even if it isn’t accompanied by the anticipated ‘blue wave’, as an excuse to drag themselves out of the covid-shaped hole they found themselves in by the end of October.
Front and centre was the Dow Jones, surging 600 points after the bell to close in on 28,500. That means the index has essentially reclaimed all of the heavy losses it incurred last week – remarkable even the depth of that decline, and the teeth-grinding anxiety of the election.
With not much else going on, the Eurozone indices followed suit. The DAX climbed past 12,550 – it started the week 1000 points below that level – thanks to a 2% increase, with the CAC up 1.6% and knocking on the door on 5000.
Only the FTSE failed to produce this kind of growth – which is odd, given the day started with the Bank of England announcing a £150 billion expansion to its quantitative easing programme.
It seems that the central bank’s warnings on unemployment, the impact of this new lockdown, and the UK’s long-term recovery, combined with a 0.7% increase for cable and notable losses for the likes of Sainsbury’s, Rolls-Royce (LON:RR) and BP (LON:BP), all conspired to keep the FTSE at the kid’s table this Thursday.
Nevertheless, the UK index did still jump 0.8%, lifting to a near 3-week peak of 5920.
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