U.S. stock futures jumped on Thursday as investors saw the threat of a blue wave recede, betting that a Republican-held Senate would block any moves if a Biden-Harris administration were elected to increase regulations and raise taxes.
Futures tracking the benchmark S&P 500 surged as much as 2%, while Nasdaq 100 futures gained 2.6% a day after Wall Street’s main indexes closed at more than one-week highs. With President Donald Trump and his Democrat rival Biden still awaiting clarity from the battleground states expected to decide the election, investors were returning to the core setting of the past decade: buying stocks with the flood of extra monetary stimulus coursing through the financial system.
Shares of technology mega-caps including Apple Inc, Amazon.com Inc and Alphabet Corp, this year’s big “stay-at-home” gainers from coronavirus lockdowns, also looked set to add to strong gains from Wednesday… Qualcomm Inc surged 15.7% after the chipmaker forecast fiscal first-quarter revenue above Wall Street estimates as it predicted sales of 5G smart phones would balloon to more than half a billion units next year, powered in part by new Apple Inc iPhone 12 models…
Democrats appeared unlikely to win the Senate, potentially making it difficult for a Democrat administration to rein in Big Tech and other businesses.
MacDailyNews Take: There’s nothing Wall Street likes better than clarity. Failing that, the prospect of gridlock (which also provides clarity) is a close second on Wall Street’s list of favorite things.