In brief
- The US presidential election has still not been decided.
- Markets, however, don't appear to be feeling the nerves.
- Bitcoin today hit its highest price since January 2018.
Anyone who was fearing that financial markets would go haywire in the wake of a close presidential election in the US can rest assured—at least for the time being.
Despite the uncertainty, traders within the stock and crypto markets have not gone crazy; they are, in fact, taking the election with an apparent ease—optimism, even. The Dow Jones is up 600 points today so far, and the price of Bitcoin just hit another 2020 milestone.
US President Donald Trump, predictably, declared himself the winner of the election last night, despite the fact that all the votes have not yet been counted. Some mail-in votes will take several days to count. But that didn’t stop Trump from calling the US electoral system a “fraud” unless the counting stopped immediately.
Democratic candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden, meanwhile, was more measured with his words, though similarly optimistic about the election outcome in his own favor.
At the time of this writing, there is still no clear victor. However, Biden currently has an edge with 238 electoral votes against Trump's 214.
But even though America still doesn’t know who its president will be in 2021, the markets are responding positively. Stocks are up, and the Dow Jones jumped 2% since the market opened this morning. It’s having its best day since mid-July.
At the same time, the S&P 500 got a boost of more than 3.2%, now sitting at 3,477 points. FAANG stocks (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google) performed remarkably well: most are up 4% today, except Netflix, whose stock price grew a little less than 2%.
The cryptocurrency market is also on a tear today. The global crypto market cap grew 2.61% in the last 24 hours. Traders now have more than $405 billion in crypto assets. Bitcoin even managed to hit a two-year high of $14,273 per coin today. It has since corrected and is now trading for just above $14,000.
The last time Bitcoin traders were this exuberant about the digital asset was during the late 2017/early 2018 bull run that took BTC to a price of nearly $20,000. Bitcoin had not hit a price above $14,200 since January 15, 2018.
This current rally, however, appears more stable. Absent is the parabolic, unsustainable growth of 2017, which has been replaced with a steady increase throughout the course of the year following the mid-March crash.
In other words, no matter what happens with the US election, there’s reason to believe that crypto traders have convinced themselves that “this is good for Bitcoin.”
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed by the author are for informational purposes only and do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice.