Stock market today: Dow, S&P 500, Nasdaq rise as Wall Street braces for election results

Palantir (PLTR) stock surged 22% after the company’s third quarter earnings surpassed Wall Street’s expectations due to a spike in spending from the US Department of Defense on its artificial intelligence tech.

Palantir’s chief revenue and legal officer, Ryan Taylor, said the company’s US government business saw its “strongest sequential growth in 15 quarters driven largely by our DoD [Department of Defense] business’s 21% quarter-over-quarter growth.”

Global government spending on Palantir’s products, primarily from the US, rose 40% from the prior year to $408 million in the third quarter, accounting for 56% of the company’s total revenue for the period. This was ahead of the $379 million expected for the segment, according to Bloomberg consensus estimates.

Overall, the company reported adjusted earnings per share of $0.10 for the quarter, a penny ahead of expectations, on revenue of $725.5 million, which topped the $703.7 million expected by Wall Street analysts.

Read the full story here.

Trump Media & Technology Group stock (DJT) climbed more than 10% higher in early trading on Tuesday, extending its double-digit rise to kick off the week as shares brace for more volatility with Election Day underway in the US.

The stock suffered its largest percentage decline last week and closed down around 20% to end the five-day period on Friday, which shaved off around $4 billion from its market cap. Shares have still more than doubled from their September lows.

The stock’s recovery comes as investors await the election of the next president: Donald Trump or Kamala Harris.

Prior to the recent volatility, shares in the company, the home of the Republican nominee’s social media platform Truth Social, had been on a steady rise as both domestic and overseas betting markets shifted in favor of a Trump victory.

Prediction sites like Polymarket, PredictIt, and Kalshi all showed Trump’s presidential chances ahead of those of Democratic nominee and current Vice President Kamala Harris. That lead, however, narrowed significantly over the weekend as new polling showed Harris surpassing Trump in Iowa, which has historically voted Republican.

And as betting markets tighten, national polls show both candidates in a virtually deadlocked race. Polls in key battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, which are likely to decide the fate of the election, also show razor-thin margins.

Here’s what the betting markets and election forecasters are saying as the 2024 campaign comes to an end.

Political betting app Kalshi recently became the first place where Americans could legally wager on the 2024 election — and the bets have flooded in.

Heading into Election Day, the site put Trump’s odds at 57% which was akin to “a very slightly biased coin flip,” Kalshi co-founder Tarek Mansour said in a Yahoo Finance appearance Monday

A compilation of other betting markets from RealClearPolling, spanning other popular sites open to overseas betters from Polymaket to Smarkets, has the odds of a Trump win at 59.2% to 39.3%. Those odds mean that Harris would win almost four contests if the election were run 10 times.

As for the polling-based election models, they projected a tighter race.

Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin model ran its last update at 12:00 a.m. ET on Nov. 5 and found a nearly exact tie in electoral college probability with Harris winning 50% of the time to 49.6% for Trump.

Silver’s final run featured 80,000 simulations with Harris winning in 40,012 of them, he wrote.

The 538.com election model was another toss-up. It found Harris winning 50 out of 100 simulations. Trump won 49 times out of 100 with a less than 1-in-100 chance of no Electoral College winner.

The final analysis from the Economist magazine found a slight Harris edge with the vice President winning 56 out of 100 hypothetical contests.

US stocks opened mostly higher on Tuesday as Election Day got underway. Markets are in wait-and-see mode when it comes to who will end up in the White House: Kamala Harris or Donald Trump.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) led the gains, up 0.5%, while the benchmark S&P 500 (^GSPC) moved up roughly 0.3%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) opened just above the flatline on the heels of a losing day for stocks.

Election Day has arrived.

And with it, all the typical banter about outcomes for the country, world, and markets. Amid the heavy news flow, Truist co-chief investment officer Keith Lerner (who will be on the Opening Bid podcast tomorrow at 8 a.m. ET with his post-election analysis) dropped the helpful chart below.

I think it offers a good reminder that, no matter the outcome of the presidential election, it has paid dividends to be an investor in stocks over time.