Updated

Updated · Business Insider · Jul 19

Morgan Stanley Says Trump Posts No Longer Jolt Markets, Focus Shifts to 2026 Policy

Updated

Updated · Business Insider · Jul 19

Morgan Stanley Says Trump Posts No Longer Jolt Markets, Focus Shifts to 2026 Policy

Q: Why would Wall Street pay for presidential posts if the market has truly become immune to them?

Wall Street would pay because the market is not fully immune to presidential posts; it is mostly less sensitive at the broad index level, not indifferent in every tradeable corner of the market. That is the key distinction in Morgan Stanley’s note. The firm said Trump’s posts no longer drive sustained, market-wide swings the way they once did, because investors have become used to the style and frequency of the messages. But it also said posts can still matter intraday, can move individual stocks, and can affect bonds or commodities when a post signals a real policy shift. For trading firms, that is enough. A few seconds or milliseconds of faster access can be valuable if a post moves a defense stock, an energy name, a tariff-exposed sector, or oil futures before the broader market fully digests it. High-frequency firms do not need a post to reshape the S&P 500 for days; they only need a short-lived pricing gap. Recent history explains the demand. Trump’s April 2025 tariff pause message came after a sharp sell-off and was followed by a 9.5% S&P 500 jump in one session. Even if such episodes are rarer now, they showed that presidential communications can still carry trading value when tied to policy. So the apparent contradiction is smaller than it looks. Morgan Stanley’s point is that investors should base strategy on durable policy outcomes, not social-media noise. The business case for paying is narrower: exploiting brief, event-driven moves before everyone else sees them.

2 articles · Updated · Business Insider · Jul 19

Major market swings after Donald Trump’s social posts have declined markedly, with equities now seeing headline risk mostly limited to possible intraday trading, Morgan Stanley said.
April 2025’s Liberation Day sell-off marked a turning point: investors have since grown used to Trump’s cadence on tariffs, the Fed and the Iran war, while bond markets react only to clear policy shifts.
Individual stocks can still jump on Trump endorsements—Morgan Stanley cited Dell, Micron and Palantir—but the bank said broader asset markets are now driven more by tangible policy changes.
Heading into November’s midterms, the bank told investors to watch Republican measures that can still advance, bipartisan areas such as China policy and AI power bottlenecks, and possible cross-party compromises.
Uncertainty from trade volatility and geopolitical tensions is still expected to persist through Trump’s term, making congressional policy outcomes a more reliable market guide than social media posts.