Four tech giants whose initials spell out Donald Trump’s favorite acronym have sent the stock market soaring to record highs.
And Trump seems to believe he deserves all the credit.
Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Apple have driven a bull market – together they account for about 17 percent of the S&P 500 and almost 70 percent of the NASDAQ gain this year.
The four tech giants all have market caps larger than $1 trillion.
And the president has taken credit for the boom. A strong economy is central argument for his November re-election campaign. Basically it’s the only argument.
“The market is setting a record. We set another record today,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Tuesday. “It will be the 144th time in a three-year period that I’m President.”
“And we have four trillion-dollar companies. One is Microsoft, one is Apple, one is Google, one is Amazon. So you have Amazon, Google, Apple, and Microsoft. And so, you have an M, you have an A, you have a G, and you have an A. You have MAGA,” he added.
He held up a sheet of paper showing how the first letters spelled out the initials of his campaign slogan: Make America Great Again.
The president, however, has a tense relationship with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post.
Trump routinely criticizes the Post for its coverage of his administration and labels stories he doesn’t like ‘fake news.’
The president does have better relations with Apple CEO Tim Cook, who he has met with at the White House.
The four stocks – Amazon, Google parent Alphabet, along with Apple and Microsoft – accounted for two-thirds of the S&P 500’s gain so far in 2020, DataTrek Research said in a note on Monday. The index is up 4.4% year-to-date.
Apple and Microsoft also account for 5% of the weight in MSCI’s all-country world index, a closely-watched barometer of global stocks, according to Ned Davis Research. That amounts to a larger market value than 47 of the 48 non-U.S. country markets in the index, all but Japan, according to Ned Davis.
“It’s just not sustainable,” said Tim Hayes, chief global investment strategist at Ned Davis Research.
The risk, Hayes said, is “that at some point these stocks are no longer going to be propping up the market but instead weighing it down.”
“And that would happen in the U.S. and then the U.S. would weigh down the global trend,” Hayes said.
True insanity:
I saw this image circulating yesterday on Twitter and thought it was photoshopped. It is not. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images) pic.twitter.com/MYp8Fq0kXM [1]
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 12, 2020 [2]