Dow futures rise 1300 points on Pfizer vaccine news, Biden wins



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Stock futures on Wall Street surged Monday after Pfizer said its vaccine was 90% effective in protecting people against Covid-19.

U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and German biotech company BioNTech made the announcement Monday morning, citing data from their end-stage vaccine trial.

Dow Jones futures soared 1,300 points, advancing further after post-election gains that came when former Vice President Joe Biden came out as the winner of the presidential race on Saturday, NBC projections show News Decision Desk.

S&P 500 futures rose 3.6% Monday morning and Nasdaq futures rose more than 2%. Travel and hospitality shares exploded after Pfizer’s announcement, in hopes that demand from passengers and visitors would return. Casino operator MGM Resorts and Delta Air Lines both jumped 18% and Royal Caribbean cruise lines jumped 25%.

“It is a game-changer,” Albert Bourla, president and CEO of Pfizer, told CNBC Monday morning. “Today is a great day for science and humanity,” he wrote in an official statement.

With election day spanning five days without results, Americans – and the markets – were eagerly awaiting whether President Donald Trump or Biden would be victorious. Biden became president-elect on Saturday after winning the pivotal state of Pennsylvania. NBC News organized the run in Pennsylvania for Biden at 11:24 a.m. ET, bringing the vote total for Biden’s constituency to 273 and allowing the network to call the election for him.

For his part, Trump refused to concede, promising Saturday to continue the legal fight, pushing unsubstantiated allegations of electoral fraud in response to news that President-elect Joe Biden had won the election.

Investors have already started repositioning their portfolios to reflect a potential new reality of a divided government, without a “blue wave” that would have seen Democrats control both houses of Congress.

With the legislature likely to be more balanced, traders bet that restrictive measures such as tighter regulations and higher taxes would be unlikely to be enacted.

On Monday morning, traders who had crammed into high-growth tech stocks began to abandon their holdings as the stay-at-home industry turned less favorable.

The tech sector has benefited tremendously from the coronavirus-induced lockdowns, with stocks such as Amazon having jumped nearly 100% since the start of the pandemic and Netflix’s market capitalization increasing by around $ 100 billion.

Markets rallied last week, supported on Friday by a better-than-expected jobs report that showed gains of 638,000 jobs, more than the 530,000 economists had predicted. Still, the jobs snapshot is a monthly reminder that the job market still has a long way to go before it recovers the 22 million jobs lost since the coronavirus pandemic hit, and indicates how hard the measures are. crucial supports such as fiscal stimulus remain.

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