The New York Stock Exchange isn’t preparing for a Donald Trump presidential victory.
A number of stock market strategists have said that investors would look to quickly hit the exits if Trump ended up pulling out a victory over Hillary Clinton in the election. Some banks, including Goldman Sachs, have estimated that the stock market could drop by as much as 6% the day after the election if Trump wins.
If that happened, the volume of buying and selling at least at the beginning of the trading day would likely be far higher than usual. That would cause a lot of stress and possibly chaos in the stock market.
What is the nation’s largest stock exchange doing to prepare for that? Nothing. The NYSE says it hasn’t run any special tests or done anything differently, or called in extra resources, to make sure it can handle the extra trading should Trump win (or Clinton, for that matter).
For another perspective on the post-election stock market, see this Coins2Day video:
“Our markets are designed to ensure performance in a range of market conditions, from regular trading activity to times of economic, political and market uncertainty,” says NYSE Group Chief Operating Officer Stacey Cunningham. “ In the last 18 months, we have implemented additional protections to further increase resiliency during periods of extreme volatility.”
One of the reasons the NYSE could be ready is that it stumbled so badly two summers ago. In August 2015, when the the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 1,000 points after bad news out of China, the NYSE had trouble accommodating trading in the shares of a number of companies because of the huge spike in activity. Since then, NYSE officials say, the exchange has made improvements to be ready for higher-volume days, especially in the morning when the market opens, which will be where the action is on Nov. 9. Indeed, the NYSE seemed to have little trouble in the wake of the Brexit vote.