NEW YORK (dpa-AFX) – Investors in the US stock markets continued to take action on the day of the eagerly awaited US presidential election. A wave of optimism sloshed on Wall Street that the election outcome would not bring any major uncertainties, said a portfolio manager. Oil prices, which recorded the strongest rise in a month, provided positive impetus.
The Dow Jones Industrial traded on Tuesday 1.92 percent higher at 27,442.20 points, after having gained 1.6 percent at the start of the week. The market-wide S&P 500 gained 1.71 percent to 3366.89 points. The Nasdaq 100 advanced 1.65 percent to 11,268.05 points.
The most attractive sectors were financials and industrials with gains of 2.4 and 2.6 percent respectively. Investors are betting that these sectors will have particularly good development prospects after the election, it said.
President Donald Trump is behind his Democratic challenger Joe Biden in polls nationwide and in several swing states. His re-election is not excluded. Because of the electoral system, the candidate with the most votes from the population can also lose if he does not unite enough voters. Before the election, Trump did not promise whether he would accept the result.
Among the individual stocks, the focus was on PayPal shares. In the Corona crisis, the online payment service continues to benefit from the trend towards online shopping and its quarterly figures exceeded analysts’ expectations. Investors, however, cashed in on the stocks that had already performed very well this year, so that the stocks fell by 2.7 percent and were almost at the bottom of the Nasdaq 100 index.
Nutrien is optimistic about further business growth. The bottom line, however, was that the fertilizer company made a loss due to high depreciation in the phosphate business. According to analyst Adam Samuelson of the bank Goldman Sachs, the adjusted operating result was also disappointing because of the weaker business with nitrogen and phosphates. Nutrien’s papers lost 7.2 percent.
The record IPO of the Chinese Alibaba subsidiary Ant Group planned for this Thursday will be postponed indefinitely. The debuts in Shanghai and Hong Kong have been suspended, Ant announced on Tuesday. The financial arm of the world’s largest Chinese online trading platform wanted to bring in around 34.5 billion US dollars with the IPO. The Alibaba papers sagged 7.9 percent.
For the shares of Bristol-Myers Squibb it went up 3.1 percent. The pharmaceutical company presented positive study data on a drug for the treatment of psoriasis./edh/he
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