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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.
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.
