Social-media king Donald Trump is coming back to rock global markets

Now with Trump storming back to reclaim the White House after Tuesday’s vote, Sosnick and the rest of Wall Street are bracing for a redux of it all, with posts on his Truth Social platform and more.

The Jawboner-in-Chief is back.

During his first term, Donald Trump’s incessant tweets were a must-read for Wall Street types, whether they liked it or not. He would crow when the stock market went up, blast Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell when it went down (“Where did I find this guy Jerome?”), bully CEOs who irked him and threaten to slap tariffs and sanctions on countries around the world.

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Anytime, day or night, policymaking via Twitter — which has been rebranded as X — became the norm, hacked out in staccato bursts to his millions of followers. These musings would often trigger sudden market swings, upending in the process the work and sleep schedules of traders and investors across financial markets.

“I remember being perpetually on edge that something could happen at any time,” said Steve Sosnick, chief strategist at Interactive Brokers, of Trump’s first term.

Now with Trump storming back to reclaim the White House after Tuesday’s vote, Sosnick and the rest of Wall Street are bracing for a redux of it all, with posts on his Truth Social platform and more. That’s because no president in modern history intertwined his fortunes so closely to the financial markets. Nor has any leader of the free world so publicly made rising stock prices such a crucial barometer of his success.

Just on market moves alone, Trump tweeted at least 100 times while in office, including mentions of the “Dow,” “Nasdaq,” “bull run,” “earnings” and “winning streak,” data compiled by Bloomberg show. Joe Biden, in keeping with past presidents, has done the same only a handful of times on the site, including this year when the S&P 500 first crossed 5,000. “We’re basically now going back to a situation where you’re susceptible to hearing almost anything,” Sosnick said.

Trump swept to a decisive win this week, spurring more gyrations across asset classes. The S&P 500 vaulted to an all-time high while small caps had their best day in two years. Bond yields and the dollar surged as traders fretted higher tariffs and fiscal spending would revive inflation and snarl trade.

Despite their contrasting approaches, returns have differed little across administrations. The S&P 500 rose 64% following Trump’s 2016 win through Biden’s victory in November 2020. Under Biden, the market has risen 69%.

But Trump’s propensity to tweet about markets was a signature of his presidency. In December 2019, when the Dow hit a high, he tweeted that he’d “never get bored of telling you that.” Wall Street is bracing for more.

“It would be hard for that tiger to change his stripes,” said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B. Riley Wealth. “That’s one of his main transmission vehicles for thoughts he has.”

The president-elect has a long history of berating and pressuring Federal Reserve officials. In March 2019, he posted that the Fed had “mistakenly raised interest rates” and “done the ridiculously timed quantitative tightening.”

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On the campaign trail earlier this year, Trump told Bloomberg News that he’d let Powell finish his term, so long as he “was doing the right thing.”

The jabs weren’t confined to Powell. Trump used his pulpit to threaten tariffs — the S&P 500 fell for four straight sessions in early May 2019 when Trump vowed to jack them up as part of his ongoing trade war with China — or pan companies and business leaders who’d fallen out of favor. The market impact of such tweets was often significant — though it lessened somewhat as traders got used to the vitriol over time.

“He’s not going to speak in generalizations,” said Steve Chiavarone, senior portfolio manager and head of multi-asset solutions at Federated Hermes. “He’s going to call out and try to make examples of specific companies that are publicly traded equities in the hopes of influencing their decision-making,” he said, with Trump likely pointing to firms that he might be able to pressure to do production and manufacturing in the US.

History supports the view. When General Motors Co got bogged down in union negotiations in 2019, Trump griped “Here we go again with General Motors and the United Auto Workers,” and also lambasted the firm for moving plants to China. Not every CEO earned his wrath. In 2020 he said Tesla Inc.’s Elon Musk, who emerged as a key campaign ally this year, did a “great job” agreeing to build a factory in Texas.

Potentially exacerbating the impact, markets have become a more round-the-clock affair since 2020, with the likes of Robinhood Markets Inc. and Interactive Brokers Group Inc. adding ways to trade American shares 24 hours a day, five days a week. That means investors will be reacting much faster, all the time, said Sosnick.

“It raises the potential for intraday volatility or single-stock volatility,” Sosnick said. “It certainly can lead to outsize moves when liquidity is thinner.”

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