The current view on Wall Street is that investors prefer former US President Donald Trump to win the 2024 presidential election over US Vice President Kamala Harris.

However, the data does not support this view. On the contrary, in the weeks when Harris's chances of winning increased, most major stock market industries saw a rebound. While Trump's chances of winning increased, most industries experienced a decline. Although these results do not prove that Wall Street prefers Harris over Trump - after all, correlation does not imply causation - they directly contradict the view that Wall Street prefers Trump's reelection.

These results were derived from analyzing the performance of 11 major stock market industries since the end of July, when US President Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race and Harris became the Democratic candidate. To calculate the chances of victory for these two candidates, American financial analyst Mark Hulbert examined the contracts of Harris and Trump on PredictIt.org.

The chart above summarizes the results. Please note that the blue bars are all positive values; they reflect the average weekly returns of the weeks when Harris's PredictIt contracts increased. This applies not only to the 11 major industries but also to the S&P 500 index itself.

The red bars reflect the average weekly returns of each industry when Trump's contracts on PredictIt increased in price. Please note that except for one industry, all industries' red bars are lower than the blue bars. The only exception is the Consumer Discretionary Industry SPDR XLY.

The best explanation Trump supporters have for these results is that they are not statistically significant. This lack of significance is not surprising because we only have three months of data for analysis. But there is a significant difference between questioning the statistical significance of the data strongly indicating that Wall Street favors Harris and insisting that Wall Street actually prefers Trump.

There is also a more general point worth mentioning: No one really knows the motivations of investors when choosing to buy, sell, or hold. This is a point recently implied by Morgan Stanley's Chief US Stock Market Strategist Mike Wilson. He noted that what many commentators refer to as the 'Trump trade' can be more easily explained by fundamentals.

Therefore, what the commentators are debating may indeed indicate that most investors are more inclined towards Trump rather than Harris. However, the opposite situation could also be true. Without this kind of understanding, Wall Street's statements provide little insight into the outcome of the November elections. Therefore, "Trump trade" and "Harris trade" may simply be ordinary bets in the stock market.