Stocks are signaling that either a win or an unexpected loss for Sen. Bernie Sanders in the New Hampshire primary will be fine, according to an analyst at Raymond James Financial.
“The market seems to view the current state of affairs as a win-win-win scenario,” analyst Ed Mills wrote in a note. That’s because President Donald Trump winning re-election is “positive for stocks,” and a Sanders nomination or a contested convention would boost Trump’s chances, while a candidate who’s more moderate than Sanders emerging as the eventual nominee would also be viewed as good news, he said.
“Although Trump may lose going up against an established moderate candidate, it’s a comparatively positive result as the new president’s policies would not be outside the norm,” Mills said. He admitted his conclusions may be an “oversimplification,” but added that at “this point we do not want to fight the tape.”
On Monday, U.S. equities climbed as investors looked past a potential economic hit from the spreading coronavirus and prepared for more corporate earnings. The S&P 500 gained as much as 0.6%.
Separately, Veda Partners’s Henrietta Treyz wrote that the most important story out of the Democrats’ New Hampshire contest may be the “extent to which Sanders has lost support in 2020 versus 2016.” That will show “where the ceiling truly lies for Bernie Sanders, even with the wind of a packed ‘moderate’ ticket and a win in Iowa at his back,” she said.
Treyz noted that Sanders won New Hampshire by a “whopping” 60.4% four years ago; while he’s currently on pace to also win this week, his victory may be with a “far smaller lead of 30% or possibly less,” she said. That would continue Sanders’s “downward trend,” as in Iowa, where he captured only 12 of the 21 delegates he won in 2016.
“The data is telling us that at least 70% of the Democratic electorate wants someone else, and that someone is markedly more moderate than he is,” Treyz added. “It continues to be our view that one of the candidates not named Biden needed/needs to win both Iowa and New Hampshire in order to separate from the pack and usurp Biden,” she said.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.