In This Article:
It has been a wild two weeks for the stock market since Donald Trump took the oath of office as the 47th president of the United States.
But to the surprise of many, Wall Street had its best first nine trading days of a presidential term in over a decade, despite Trump bookending a turbulent week that began with concerns that Chinese startup DeepSeek could disrupt the dominance of American companies in the AI race with his long-awaited plans for applying tariffs.
Most Read from MarketWatch
-
Dow futures tumble, oil surges after Trump tariffs end ‘self-delusion in markets’
-
The blogger who helped spark Nvidia’s $600 billion stock collapse and a panic in Silicon Valley
-
Stocks defy tariffs, DeepSeek drama to post best presidential term start since 2013
-
Invest in these safe havens to protect against Trump tariff fallout, Goldman says
The AI developments spurred a brutal rout of technology stocks earlier this week, with Nvidia Corp. NVDA seeing over $590 billion in market capitalization wiped out on Monday.
Read: The blogger who helped spark Nvidia’s $600 billion stock collapse and a panic in Silicon Valley
Still, the S&P 500 SPX rose over 0.7% since Inauguration Day. It was the best first nine trading days of a presidency for the large-cap index since former President Barack Obama was sworn in for a second term in 2013, according to Dow Jones Market Data (see table below).
The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA surged 2.4% to start Trump’s second term, also booking its best first nine-trading-day span since 2013. However, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite COMP was little changed since Inauguration Day, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
Despite surging volatility in the stock market, the psychology of investors has been that “any dip is perceived as a buying opportunity, and every uptrend is perceived as being something to follow,” said Steve Sosnick, chief strategist at Interactive Brokers.
Investors still were feeling “invulnerable” as a strong bull run that has lasted for over two years continues, so they have been willing to overlook “the wall of worry” and focus on broad optimism about Trump’s policy plans, such as deregulation and planned income tax cuts, Sosnick told MarketWatch via phone on Friday.
Over the past two weeks, Trump has signed a blizzard of executive orders on immigration, energy and AI, including the new $500 billion Stargate initiative focused on AI infrastructure, which last week propelled the S&P 500 to its first record close of 2025. Some of his actions already received pushback by other branches of government, but not before impacting people’s lives in the U.S. and abroad — though market reactions have been relatively subdued.