The Dow surges to biggest gain in two years, with bond yields and bitcoin also posting sharp climbs
4 min
Donald Trump ’s election victory powered the Dow Jones Industrial Average to its biggest gain in two years, with a broad market rally lifting shares of banks, industrial companies and small-cap firms that are expected to benefit from continued economic expansion.
The gains were widely distributed as Wall Street bet that Trump’s promises of deregulation and tax cuts will further ignite an economy that already has posted strong gains in recent years. But sectors that were expected to benefit from Democratic policies, such as electric-vehicle companies and clean-energy related industries, declined sharply.
The promise of four years of Republican rule drove the latest rise in Treasury yields, reflecting expectations of stronger growth and inflation, while gold prices fell as fears that the election results would be contested and spark social unrest weren’t realised.
“The markets are now trading full-on Trump trade,” said Stephen Dainton, a senior executive at Barclays who oversees the lender’s investment bank including its large trading division.
Big winners included banks, which investors bet were poised to benefit from reduced regulation and a fresh acceleration in growth. Shares of JPMorgan Chase , the nation’s largest lender, climbed 11% to a new record. Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs both rose more than 12%.
The prospect of lighter regulation and protective tariffs helped drive gains in industrials, with equipment maker Caterpillar rising more than 8% to a new all-time high and 3M adding 5%. Domestic steelmakers Nucor and Steel Dynamics gained 16% and 13%, respectively. Railroads, including Norfolk Southern and CSX , surged.
Bitcoin rose as much as 9% and flirted with $75,000, topping a previous record from March. Trump has said that he wants to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the planet” and has pledged to create a “strategic bitcoin reserve.”
At the same time, traders also sought out companies and assets they expect to suffer during a second Trump administration.
Fears of trade wars drove down shares of ocean freight firms, including Denmark’s A.P. Moller-Maersk and Germany’s Hapag-Lloyd . Copper prices had their worst day in more than two years, dropping 5.1% as metals traders in New York reconsidered demand forecasts that hinge on the Chinese economy and the clean-energy boom.
Investors’ belief that Trump may break with the Biden administration’s push into renewable energy and electric vehicles hit companies as far away as South Korea. LG Energy Solution fell roughly 7%, as did other local EV battery makers, and Hanwha Solutions, which makes solar panels, dropped by more than 8%. In the U.S., First Solar fell 11% while Enphase Energy lost 17%.
Shares of Tesla , the electric-vehicle maker helmed by Trump ally and donor Elon Musk , bucked the trend, climbing 15%.
Investors sold bonds, driving yields higher and widening the gap between yields on ordinary Treasurys and those on inflation-protected Treasurys. That is a sign they think that the policies of a second Trump term could put upward pressure on inflation.
Many investors also believe that Trump’s tax-cut-heavy policies will add to the deficit, with the threat of a larger supply of Treasurys helping push down bond prices. The yield on the 10-year Treasury topped 4.4% for the first time since July.
That hit firms and investments that are sensitive to higher bond yields. The S&P 500’s consumer-staples sector declined 1.7% and the utilities segment lost 0.6% The real-estate sector sank 3.4%. The country’s largest home builder, D.R. Horton , dropped nearly 5% and Zillow Group fell about 7%.
Surging yields intensified a climb in the U.S. dollar, which was also boosted by the prospect of rising tariffs. Economists say tariffs can lift the U.S. currency by hurting the economies of foreign countries and discouraging Americans from spending on imported goods.
The WSJ Dollar Index, which measures the U.S. dollar against a basket of 16 currencies, rose around 1.3%. The Mexican peso lost as much as 3.4% against the dollar to its lowest level since August 2022, according to Dow Jones Market Data, before recovering. Trump recently said he could impose 200% tariffs on vehicles made in the country. The potential for tariffs also drove down the Chinese yuan.
Early wins by Trump in key states assuaged fears that it could take days or weeks for the election to be called. The Cboe Volatility Index—known as the VIX, or the market’s fear gauge—plunged to its lowest level since late September.
The relative calm had investors hoping more gains lie ahead. The S&P 500 had already risen 21% through Election Day, its best performance in a presidential election year since 1936, when Franklin Roosevelt was in office. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 12%, its best election-year performance since 1996, when Bill Clinton was in the White House.
“There’s a lot of relief that there’s a clear-cut outcome and that markets can move on to things that are quite frankly more important than who sits in the White House,” said Ross Mayfield, investment strategist at Baird.
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As AI productivity trackers reshape workplace evaluations, employees are learning how to manage calendars, activity levels and AI usage to ensure their contributions are recognized.
4 min
What’s more important than being a good employee right now? Looking like a good employee in the eyes of AI productivity trackers that more managers are using to evaluate their teams.
Employee-monitoring systems are especially popular at tech companies and are also used by other white-collar firms that want to probe how people spend company time. The scary thing: You might not even know you’re being watched because many states don’t require disclosure.
Metrics can include performance data that is undoubtedly relevant, such as sales results. But it also can employ dubious proxies like keyboard strokes and how often your computer screen goes into sleep mode.
We generally accepted, or at least understood, heightened surveillance during the work-from-home era. Back then it seemed reasonable for bosses to keep tabs on employees they couldn’t see.
Yet the oversight has only escalated, and tensions are rising, too.
A group of former Meta Platforms employees alleges in a lawsuit that the company used a “constellation of internal artificial-intelligence systems” when it began laying off about 10% of its workforce in May. Meta says humans make termination calls.
However that case shakes out, a couple of things are clear. Companies eager to gauge which employees are locked in now have sophisticated AI monitoring systems at their disposal. And they believe they have leverage in a tepid labor market.
So while we may chafe at having our worth reduced to numbers on the boss’s productivity dashboard, we have to play the game as it’s being played. Here are some tips, based on conversations with people who make employee monitoring systems—and others who game the systems.
Calendar integration is one way that productivity trackers have gotten more advanced and, ostensibly, fairer.
Let’s say you make an old-fashioned phone call or attend an in-person meeting. Your Outlook or Slack status may switch to “away,” making you appear as inactive as if you were taking an extended coffee break.
Employee monitors like one made by a company called Insightful cross-check your online status with your calendar to see whether there is a valid reason for your apparent inactivity. If that call or meeting is on your schedule, then the system will recognize that you are busy offline. If nothing is on the books, it could look like you’re slacking off.
Let’s not go any further without addressing the underlying question: How much downtime is permissible during the workday? After all, people have been scared to let managers see anything non-work-related on their screens since personal computers first arrived in offices.
No one knows this better than Roger Wagner, who is widely credited with creating the first “boss button” in the early 1980s. He designed a keyboard shortcut to instantly display a spreadsheet if the boss walked by your cubicle while you were playing a computer game. Boss buttons have been features of countless diversions since. (I confess to using one built into a March Madness streaming app.)
Wagner, the founder of computer-education company 1010 Technologies, says his original design was a joke—more of a commentary on overbearing managers than a cover for lazy employees. Good bosses understand workers need mental breaks throughout the day, he says.
This matches what I heard from Insightful Chief Executive Ivan Petrovic. He says customers that use his company’s workforce-management platform don’t expect employees to stay on task 100% of the time.
“On average companies are aiming for 60% to 80% of your time being utilized for work during the day,” he says.
Go ahead and exhale. It’s probably OK to watch an occasional YouTube video at your desk.
And if you’re going to artificially inflate your activity level, be careful. Hitting 90% could look suspicious.
So don’t leave your mouse jiggler on all day. Choose the right one if you must resort to shenanigans.
There are lots of software applications that mimic the movements of a computer mouse, so you can appear to be working while away from your desk. There are also devices that plug into computer ports and do the same thing.
Corporate cybersecurity systems increasingly block these apps and devices, and productivity trackers claim to be able to detect them. But some workers swear by mouse docks, like one made by Tech8 USA, that keep cursors moving. The company originally made mouse-moving software but now focuses on physical jigglers.
“People are drawn to mechanical solutions because they’re so simple and don’t require software,” says Tech8 Marketing Director Sam Matthews. “As monitoring technology becomes more sophisticated, that distinction has become even more relevant.”
Another popular metric for employee-monitoring systems is AI usage. Companies want to know who is embracing new tools, and it can be tempting to think more is better.
“There’s a performative aspect where employees overblow their usage of AI so that they appear relevant in the organization,” says Andrea Derler, principal researcher at Visier, which helps companies track and analyze employee work habits.
In a recent Visier survey of 1,000 U.S. workers, 48% admitted to exaggerating their AI usage.
This is already an outdated strategy. Using AI for everything used to score points for experimentation. Now it can seem wasteful because many companies are watching AI token spending more carefully.
Look, productivity theater has always been part of work. Most of us aren’t trying to cheat the system, but expectations are changing so quickly that we need to be savvy about what the latest employee trackers are looking for.
Sometimes it takes a little gamesmanship to get full credit for our contributions.
