President Trump’s administration is having a big influence on the stock market at the start of 2026.
The U.S. attack on Venezuela sent the value of some oil stocks surging. Mr. Trump’s social media post calling for a cap on credit card interest rates caused the stocks of credit card issuers to slump. And after the president proposed new requirements governing Nvidia’s computer chip sales to China, that tech giant’s stock also fell, weighing on the rest of the market.
Historically, many analysts had concluded that the person in the White House didn’t much matter to stocks, and certainly less than the Federal Reserve and where it would set interest rates.
But investors’ reactions to Mr. Trump’s recent pronouncements have left some wondering, for now at least, whether the White House is becoming more of a market mover.
“The adage used to be ‘Don’t fight the Fed,’” said Hardika Singh, a stock analyst at Fundstrat. “This year I think it will be ‘Don’t fight the White House.’”
There have been periods like this before under President Trump. In April, for example, his initial tariff proposals sent the stock market into a tailspin. But so far this year, Mr. Trump has been driving big stock moves in specific sectors, while the S&P 500 has risen just 1 percent.
One of those sectors is the oil industry. The Trump administration has said it intends to sell 30 million to 50 million barrels of Venezuelan oil, “controlled by me, as President of the United States of America, to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States,” Mr. Trump said in social media post.
Oil executives have expressed misgivings about returning to Venezuela after the U.S. military ousted Nicolás Maduro this month. But Mr. Trump’s bullishness on Venezuelan oil has sent the energy sector of the S&P 500 up 7.5 percent for the year through Thursday.
SLB and Halliburton lead the gains, up over 20 percent and 15 percent. The companies handle the infrastructure that enables oil companies to drill, with investors viewing them as likely to profit regardless of which energy companies return to Venezuela.
Shares of oil companies like Chevron and Exxon Mobil have risen around 10 percent since the start of the year.
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Ms. Singh found that surprising.
The actual price of oil has risen just over 2 percent and remains below $60 per barrel, around the threshold for most oil companies to remain profitable but not high enough to push them to ramp up investment in new drilling activities in Venezuela, Ms. Singh said.
“I think this is the first example we’re seeing this year (and many more to come) about how Trump’s politics are upending the last fringes of the traditional market playbook,” she wrote in an email.
Late last week, Mr. Trump floated a 10 percent cap on credit card interest rates, drawing immediate pushback from banking chiefs and questions from lawmakers about how the administration could achieve this cap without an act of Congress.
Since his social media post, shares of all 13 banks in the S&P 500’s banking sector have fallen, led by drops of over 5 percent for Wells Fargo, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase.
Some investors said it could be hard to gauge which Trump administration announcements would become reality, which would be spiked and which simply wouldn’t have much impact.
The administration’s repeated attacks on top officials at the Fed has worried corporate leaders about the central bank’s independence.
Yet investors shrugged at revelations this week that the Department of Justice was investigating the Fed’s chair, Jerome H. Powell, over the renovation of its Washington headquarters. Analysts said investors had concluded that the administration was not likely to follow through on its threats to Mr. Powell because there was too much of a risk that such action would seriously harm the market, which values an independent Fed.
Likewise, when Mr. Trump first announced his suite of tariffs on the world in April, the stock market plunged. It has recovered after a more watered-down set of tariffs were imposed.
Parag Thatte, a stock analyst at Deutsche Bank, said a similar dynamic remained in 2026, a midterm election year.
The president’s approval rating closely follows consumer confidence in the economy, so policies that have a detrimental effect on growth and inflation are likely to have a short shelf life, Mr. Thatte said.
“If it ends up hurting growth or inflation, then it will hurt consumer confidence,” he said. “We think that restricts the actual range of adverse policies that might get enacted.”
That could also curtail plans around capping interest rates on credit cards or forcing the Fed into lowering interest rates further, which some economists fear could stoke inflation, achieving the opposite outcome that Mr. Trump is aiming for.
“If the goal is to narrow wealth inequality, that will fail,” said Rob Arnott, founder of Research Affiliates. “If the aim is to put money in people’s pockets before an election, then it’s a winning strategy.”
Joe Rennison writes about financial markets, a beat that ranges from chronicling the vagaries of the stock market to explaining the often-inscrutable trading decisions of Wall Street insiders.
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