Markets Close Higher
We’re still several hours away from getting any actual election results, but investors seem to like whatever signs they’re seeing. The major U.S. stock indexes all ended the day higher, though they gave up some of their gains from earlier in the day. The S&P 500 closed up 0.4 percent, while the Dow Jones industrial average rose 73 points. (The Dow had been up more than 140 points earlier in the day.)
As I noted earlier, some recent research has found that investors are rooting for a Clinton win. The Wall Street Journal’s Paul Vigna earlier today suggested that the markets were responding to real-time election estimates based on data from Votecastr. Those estimates, which are being published by Slate and Vice, have been generally favorable for Clinton. (At FiveThirtyEight, we’re watching the Votecastr experiment with interest but aren’t relying on its estimates.) It’s hard to know how much weight investors were giving to Votecastr’s estimates or other election-related tidbits; in fact, there’s no way to know for sure that today’s market moves were driven by the election, period. But at the very least investors don’t seem too concerned by what they’re seeing at the polls.