Stocks Soar, Dollar Jumps as Trump’s Win Reverberates Through Markets

Donald Trump ’s election victory powered the Dow Jones Industrial Average to its biggest gain in two years, with a broad market rally lifting shares of banks, industrial companies and small-cap firms that are expected to benefit from continued economic expansion.

The gains were widely distributed as Wall Street bet that Trump’s promises of deregulation and tax cuts will further ignite an economy that already has posted strong gains in recent years. But sectors that were expected to benefit from Democratic policies, such as electric-vehicle companies and clean-energy related industries, declined sharply.

The promise of four years of Republican rule drove the latest rise in Treasury yields, reflecting expectations of stronger growth and inflation, while gold prices fell as fears that the election results would be contested and spark social unrest weren’t realised.

“The markets are now trading full-on Trump trade,” said Stephen Dainton , a senior executive at Barclays who oversees the lender’s investment bank including its large trading division.

Big winners included banks, which investors bet were poised to benefit from reduced regulation and a fresh acceleration in growth. Shares of JPMorgan Chase , the nation’s largest lender, climbed 11% to a new record. Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs both rose more than 12%.

The prospect of lighter regulation and protective tariffs helped drive gains in industrials, with equipment maker Caterpillar rising more than 8% to a new all-time high and 3M adding 5%. Domestic steelmakers Nucor and Steel Dynamics gained 16% and 13%, respectively. Railroads, including Norfolk Southern and CSX , surged.

Bitcoin rose as much as 9% and flirted with $75,000, topping a previous record from March. Trump has said that he wants to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the planet” and has pledged to create a “strategic bitcoin reserve.”

At the same time, traders also sought out companies and assets they expect to suffer during a second Trump administration.

Fears of trade wars drove down shares of ocean freight firms, including Denmark’s A.P. Moller-Maersk and Germany’s Hapag-Lloyd . Copper prices had their worst day in more than two years, dropping 5.1% as metals traders in New York reconsidered demand forecasts that hinge on the Chinese economy and the clean-energy boom.

Investors’ belief that Trump may break with the Biden administration’s push into renewable energy and electric vehicles hit companies as far away as South Korea. LG Energy Solution fell roughly 7%, as did other local EV battery makers, and Hanwha Solutions, which makes solar panels, dropped by more than 8%. In the U.S., First Solar fell 11% while Enphase Energy lost 17%.

Shares of Tesla , the electric-vehicle maker helmed by Trump ally and donor Elon Musk , bucked the trend, climbing 15%.

Investors sold bonds, driving yields higher and widening the gap between yields on ordinary Treasurys and those on inflation-protected Treasurys. That is a sign they think that the policies of a second Trump term could put upward pressure on inflation.

Many investors also believe that Trump’s tax-cut-heavy policies will add to the deficit, with the threat of a larger supply of Treasurys helping push down bond prices. The yield on the 10-year Treasury topped 4.4% for the first time since July.

That hit firms and investments that are sensitive to higher bond yields. The S&P 500’s consumer-staples sector declined 1.7% and the utilities segment lost 0.6% The real-estate sector sank 3.4%. The country’s largest home builder, D.R. Horton , dropped nearly 5% and Zillow Group fell about 7%.

Surging yields intensified a climb in the U.S. dollar, which was also boosted by the prospect of rising tariffs. Economists say tariffs can lift the U.S. currency by hurting the economies of foreign countries and discouraging Americans from spending on imported goods.

The WSJ Dollar Index, which measures the U.S. dollar against a basket of 16 currencies, rose around 1.3%. The Mexican peso lost as much as 3.4% against the dollar to its lowest level since August 2022, according to Dow Jones Market Data, before recovering. Trump recently said he could impose 200% tariffs on vehicles made in the country. The potential for tariffs also drove down the Chinese yuan.

Early wins by Trump in key states assuaged fears that it could take days or weeks for the election to be called. The Cboe Volatility Index—known as the VIX, or the market’s fear gauge—plunged to its lowest level since late September.

The relative calm had investors hoping more gains lie ahead. The S&P 500 had already risen 21% through Election Day, its best performance in a presidential election year since 1936, when Franklin Roosevelt was in office. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 12%, its best election-year performance since 1996, when Bill Clinton was in the White House.

“There’s a lot of relief that there’s a clear-cut outcome and that markets can move on to things that are quite frankly more important than who sits in the White House,” said Ross Mayfield, investment strategist at Baird.

There has rarely, if ever, been so much tech talent available in the job market. Yet many tech companies say good help is hard to find.

What gives?

U.S. colleges more than doubled the number of computer-science degrees awarded from 2013 to 2022, according to federal data. Then came round after round of layoffs at Google, Meta, Amazon, and others.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts businesses will employ 6% fewer computer programmers in 2034 than they did last year.

All of this should, in theory, mean there is an ample supply of eager, capable engineers ready for hire.

But in their feverish pursuit of artificial-intelligence supremacy, employers say there aren’t enough people with the most in-demand skills. The few perceived as AI savants can command multimillion-dollar pay packages. On a second tier of AI savvy, workers can rake in close to $1 million a year .

Landing a job is tough for most everyone else.

Frustrated job seekers contend businesses could expand the AI talent pipeline with a little imagination. The argument is companies should accept that relatively few people have AI-specific experience because the technology is so new. They ought to focus on identifying candidates with transferable skills and let those people learn on the job.

Often, though, companies seem to hold out for dream candidates with deep backgrounds in machine learning. Many AI-related roles go unfilled for weeks or months—or get taken off job boards only to be reposted soon after.

Playing a different game

It is difficult to define what makes an AI all-star, but I’m sorry to report that it’s probably not whatever you’re doing.

Maybe you’re learning how to work more efficiently with the aid of ChatGPT and its robotic brethren. Perhaps you’re taking one of those innumerable AI certificate courses.

You might as well be playing pickup basketball at your local YMCA in hopes of being signed by the Los Angeles Lakers. The AI minds that companies truly covet are almost as rare as professional athletes.

“We’re talking about hundreds of people in the world, at the most,” says Cristóbal Valenzuela, chief executive of Runway, which makes AI image and video tools.

He describes it like this: Picture an AI model as a machine with 1,000 dials. The goal is to train the machine to detect patterns and predict outcomes. To do this, you have to feed it reams of data and know which dials to adjust—and by how much.

The universe of people with the right touch is confined to those with uncanny intuition, genius-level smarts or the foresight (possibly luck) to go into AI many years ago, before it was all the rage.

As a venture-backed startup with about 120 employees, Runway doesn’t necessarily vie with Silicon Valley giants for the AI job market’s version of LeBron James. But when I spoke with Valenzuela recently, his company was advertising base salaries of up to $440,000 for an engineering manager and $490,000 for a director of machine learning.

A job listing like one of these might attract 2,000 applicants in a week, Valenzuela says, and there is a decent chance he won’t pick any of them. A lot of people who claim to be AI literate merely produce “workslop”—generic, low-quality material. He spends a lot of time reading academic journals and browsing GitHub portfolios, and recruiting people whose work impresses him.

In addition to an uncommon skill set, companies trying to win in the hypercompetitive AI arena are scouting for commitment bordering on fanaticism .

Daniel Park is seeking three new members for his nine-person startup. He says he will wait a year or longer if that’s what it takes to fill roles with advertised base salaries of up to $500,000.

He’s looking for “prodigies” willing to work seven days a week. Much of the team lives together in a six-bedroom house in San Francisco.

If this sounds like a lonely existence, Park’s team members may be able to solve their own problem. His company, Pickle, aims to develop personalised AI companions akin to Tony Stark’s Jarvis in “Iron Man.”

Overlooked

James Strawn wasn’t an AI early adopter, and the father of two teenagers doesn’t want to sacrifice his personal life for a job. He is beginning to wonder whether there is still a place for people like him in the tech sector.

He was laid off over the summer after 25 years at Adobe , where he was a senior software quality-assurance engineer. Strawn, 55, started as a contractor and recalls his hiring as a leap of faith by the company.

He had been an artist and graphic designer. The managers who interviewed him figured he could use that background to help make Illustrator and other Adobe software more user-friendly.

Looking for work now, he doesn’t see the same willingness by companies to take a chance on someone whose résumé isn’t a perfect match to the job description. He’s had one interview since his layoff.

“I always thought my years of experience at a high-profile company would at least be enough to get me interviews where I could explain how I could contribute,” says Strawn, who is taking foundational AI courses. “It’s just not like that.”

The trouble for people starting out in AI—whether recent grads or job switchers like Strawn—is that companies see them as a dime a dozen.

“There’s this AI arms race, and the fact of the matter is entry-level people aren’t going to help you win it,” says Matt Massucci, CEO of the tech recruiting firm Hirewell. “There’s this concept of the 10x engineer—the one engineer who can do the work of 10. That’s what companies are really leaning into and paying for.”

He adds that companies can automate some low-level engineering tasks, which frees up more money to throw at high-end talent.

It’s a dynamic that creates a few handsomely paid haves and a lot more have-nots.

Stocks Soar, Dollar Jumps as Trump’s Win Reverberates Through Markets

The Dow surges to biggest gain in two years, with bond yields and bitcoin also posting sharp climbs

A divide has opened in the tech job market between those with artificial-intelligence skills and everyone else.

Playing a different game

Overlooked