- Tuesday marked the start of a new cycle in global markets, as President Donald Trump started his second day back in the White House, where he will again oversee the world’s largest economy.
Over the course of the first trading day of his presidency, major indices rose, several—but not all—megacap tech stocks saw their share prices increase. Nvidia, whose market cap surpassed Apple’s last year, regained its stock market dominance as the world’s most valuable publicly traded company after a wobbly few weeks to start the year. Meanwhile, Apple faced investor skepticism over its lackluster sales in China.
On a broader market note, investors’ fears of sweeping, immediate tariffs seemed assuaged. The crypto market, which Trump embraced during his campaign, got off to a decent start.
Across the board all the stock market gauges gained. The S&P 500 rose 0.89%, the Dow Jones added 537 points, rising 1.2%, and the Russell 2000 gained 1.8% on the day. The Russell 2000 includes more small-cap stocks than the other two indices. Investors believe that Trump’s efforts to deregulate business will benefit smaller companies more than others.
A mixed bag for tech stocks
Tuesday’s rising market tides also lifted the biggest boats moored in Silicon Valley. Several tech giants saw their stock prices go up: Alphabet rose 1%, Amazon went up 2%, and Meta ticked up 0.6%. Executives from all three companies were present at Trump’s inauguration. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Amazon founder and executive chair Jeff Bezos had prime seats at Monday’s ceremony.
Nvidia also rose 2.3% on the day, after a mid-January slump, as it was able to brush off investor fears that its sales might start to lag. As a stock market darling, Nvidia often suffers from being compared to its own excellence, where anything short of a perfect quarter risks sending the stock down. So when recent murmurs of an “air pocket” surfaced, the stock faltered slightly. The air pocket refers to the idea that Nvidia’s biggest customers will hold off on ordering its current chips as they wait for its newer Blackwell models to be released.
UBS analyst Timothy Arcuri was unconcerned. “We remain confident that NVDA will deliver strong fourth quarter results and first quarter guidance and investor concerns around a near term ‘air-pocket’ are overblown,” he wrote in an analyst note published Monday.
That said, not all of the major tech companies started off the Trump administration with a field day in the markets. Apple and Tesla both slid on Tuesday, though for different reasons.
Apple dropped 3.2% after getting downgraded by Jeffries and Loop Capital and having its price target cut by JPMorgan. Analysts are worried that sales of Apple products in China are not improving. During the fourth quarter of last year, sales in China fell 18%, according to research cited by Bloomberg. Apple’s woes could only be worsened if Trump does impose tariffs on Chinese goods, because the company sources many parts for its products from the country. Working in Apple’s favor, though, is a history of successfully navigating Trump’s tariffs.
Meanwhile Tesla, whose CEO Elon Musk is one of Trump’s closest confidants, saw its share price slip 0.6%. Tuesday’s dip came after a strong performance to start the year, when the stock rose 10%. On Monday, Trump removed a series of tax rebates targeting electric-vehicle purchases that President Joe Biden had enacted. Yet Musk has always maintained that doing away with the subsidies would hurt Tesla’s competitors more than it would his company. An independent report from the consulting firm Brand Finance found that Tesla lost roughly $15 billion in brand value because of Musk’s polarizing figure and the company’s aging product lineup.
Trump takes it easy on tariffs
This time around, global investors are bracing for the litany of America First policies that Trump espoused on the campaign trail. In particular, Trump’s embrace of tariffs seemed to set the stage for a new American trade regime. Trump’s potential tariffs were among the most worrisome for investors who dreaded that blanket tariffs could roil global markets.
However, on Monday, when Trump signed a series of executive orders, his tone on tariffs was more muted than expected. Trump said he was “thinking” of 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico that could start on Feb. 1, but provided no further details. The president added that he was considering tariffs on China as part of a deal that could include keeping TikTok operational in the U.S. Trump floated the idea of implementing “universal tariffs” later in his administration, but held off for now. “We’re not ready for that yet,” he told reporters in the White House on Monday.
Investors took those remarks as signs that tariffs would not be implemented as swiftly or be widespread across all imported goods. “However, some less likely policies like universal tariffs are risks, though firms may adjust accordingly to offset some of the impact,” Glenmede chief of investment strategy and research Jason Pride wrote Tuesday in a note to investors.
But Trump’s remarks still led to slides in the Mexican peso and the Canadian dollar in the foreign currency market. The mentions of possible tariffs were enough to weaken the two currencies against the U.S. dollar. The U.S. dollar rose 0.6% to 1.4397 Canadian dollars and 0.9% to the Mexican peso.
Crypto ticks up at the start of Trump 2.0
Just as Trump embraced tariffs as his trade policy of choice, he also became a bigger supporter of the crypto industry. That was a reversal of his previous position on digital currencies; he once called Bitcoin a “scam against the dollar.” Now that Trump has changed his tune on crypto, certain coins and stocks associated with the industry rose.
On Tuesday, the price of Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market cap, rose 4.67% to 106,193. In the days leading up to Trump’s inauguration Bitcoin hit an all-time high of more than $109,000 a coin. It then fell, before recovering on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, the share price of Coinbase, the largest crypto trading platform, which often serves as a bellwether for investor sentiment on the broader industry, had an up-and-down day in the markets. At the time of publication it is down 0.4% after being up more than 2% earlier in the day. Since Trump’s election Coinbase’s stock rose roughly 15%. Investors consider Coinbase to be a safer investment than specific cryptocurrencies because it is not subject to the market moves of a single coin, but rather goes the way of the industry as a whole.
