By Steve Dinnen
Winners and losers made themselves known at the opening bell on Wednesday morning, just hours after Donald Trump won the election. Incongruities sprang forth.
Facing the prospect of less regulation, banks and financial services had a banner day on Wednesday. Discover Financial Services jumped 17.38%. Capital One Financial Corp. rose 15%.
Investors seemed to overlook Trump’s speech in September that proposed capping credit card interest rates at 10% to give consumers a break. These two companies have about $500 billion worth of credit card debts, and average interest rates on cards now top 20%.
To be clear: All these stocks with huge daily gains or losses did so based on what might lie in store for them, good or bad, once Trump moves back into the White House. So how do Discover and Capital One notch double-digit share price gains in the face of a promise to gut them?
Tesla Motors climbed 14.75%, apparently on the hunch that the new bromance between Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk will bring good things to the carmaker. But Tesla makes only electric vehicles, and pretty much everything tied to EVs — car producers, lithium miners, battery makers, etc. — was on the skids Wednesday. Alternative energy stocks tanked, as well. A Tesla subsidiary, Solar City, makes all its money selling solar panels.
Musk owns a huge piece of SpaceX, whose rockets Trump praised on Wednesday. But Tesla has no financial ties to SpaceX, or its subsidiary, satellite operator Starlink.
Trading in Trump Media and Technology Group, the operator of Truth Media, the president-elect’s social media platform, was briefly halted on Wednesday as it shot up 35%. It settled at 35.96, a nice 5.6% gain that pegged its market capitalization at $6.8 billion. This, for a company that posts revenues of around $1 million per quarter.
Incongruities, indeed.
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