Ka-ching in 2016
Trump rally caps boffo year on Wall St.
Wall Street’s whiplashed year is finally over.
The stock market ended 2016 with a whimper on Friday, a muted close for the most dramatic year for investors since the financial crisis, as major indexes were rocked by seismic shifts in the global political order from the US to China.
The Dow Jones industrial average smashed through record after record this year, with at least 20 sessions concluding at all-time highs before ending the year up 13 percent. More than half the gains this year for the Dow have come since Nov. 8, after Donald Trump was elected president.
“Since Election Day, the returns have been parabolic,” Sam Stovall, an analyst at CFRA, told The Post.
On Friday, the year’s last trading day, the index fell slightly, by 0.3 percent, to 19,762.60. Still, it finished with its thirdhighest yearly gain since the end of the financial crisis eight years ago.
That tells only part of the story of a volatile year: The Dow ended up rising more than 25 percent from its low point in February, to its all-time high of 19,987.63 on Dec. 20 .
Other broad measures of US stocks also logged solid gains. The S&P 500, which has a broader range of US companies, rose 9.4 percent, to 2,238.83. The Nasdaq Composite, which largely tracks technology stocks, ended the year up 7.5 percent, to 5,383.12. Chipmaker Nvidia led both those indexes, more than tripling in value, after announcing that it will work with Chinese company Baidu to develop selfdriving cars.
Wall Street started the year in a bad way, as the price of oil collapsed and fears about China’s economy sent investors scrambling. The Dow fell 1,078.58 points during the first five days, making for the worst-ever start to the year.
On June 24, after the UK shocked the world with a vote to leave the European Union, stocks tanked around the world. About $420 billion was wiped out of the S&P 500 that day alone. The British pound collapsed 10 percent against the dollar and never recovered.
But it was the surprise election of Trump that sent markets skyrocketing at the end of the year.
Wall Street had assumed that Hillary Clinton would win the election. Some of the biggest CEOs, including JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein, openly supported her.
Late on Nov. 8, after it was clear that Clinton had lost three crucial states — and would therefore lose the election — Dow Jones futures had collapsed, and investors predicted that stocks would open down about 750 points.
The opposite happened. After digesting the news, investors bought everything in sight, based on assumptions that Trump would cut corporate taxes, spend billions on infrastructure programs and reduce regulations. Caterpillar was the Dow’s biggest gainer, rising more than 36 percent.
The Trump rally lasted more than 40 days, sending the Dow across 19,000 just two days before Thanksgiving, and ending just below 20,000 for the final two weeks of the year.