Guide to Investing in the New Trump Economy
Trish Regan is one of America’s most recognized financial journalists and digital media hosts. An award-winning reporter, author, television personality, and speaker, Trish is a leading economic and political thought leader who helps viewers to better understand the most critical issues facing the economy and American business today. With extraordinary access to newsmakers and industry sources, as well as a knack for anticipating opportunities and risks in investing, Trish leverages her knowledge of how the mainstream media works to enable subscribers to best understand the information moving markets.
Trish is the Co-Founder and Executive Editor of 76research. She is also the founder, owner, and host of the daily livestreamed Trish Regan Show with more than 16 million views per month. Prior to founding 76research with longtime friend Rob Hordon, Trish anchored some of the most highly rated financial programs at America’s most noted financial networks including CNBC, Bloomberg, and most recently, Fox Business News.
Throughout her career, Trish has interviewed numerous heads of state, including multiple U.S. Presidents, foreign leaders, Fortune 500 CEOs and other institutional, charitable, and government leaders.
Trish credits her start in journalism to her fifth grade position as school correspondent for her local New Hampshire newspaper. But, while Trish showed an early interest in reporting and writing, it wasn’t until years later that she chose to make journalism her career. In fact, she originally intended to pursue a career in finance and worked as an analyst in emerging debt markets at Goldman Sachs while a student at Columbia University. Fluent in Spanish, Trish focused primarily on Latin American sovereign debt markets including Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela, and Brazil, but when Bloomberg Television offered her an opportunity to work as a correspondent, she made the jump into financial media.
Beginning at Bloomberg in 2000, Trish was on the front lines as the dot-com bubble burst. She covered its aftermath from Silicon Valley and San Francisco as a correspondent at MarketWatch before moving back to New York to work as a correspondent for CBS News. In 2006, Trish returned to her financial roots as an anchor on CNBC’s top-rated daily markets program The Call where she reported on the 2008 financial crisis in real time. While an anchor at CNBC, Trish also reported business news for NBC's Nightly News and The Today Show. In addition, she produced and hosted the two most highly rated documentaries in CNBC's history – Marijuana Inc and Marijuana USA, which investigated a massive and fast-developing underground industry. Trish predicted that industry would soon become mainstream in her book Joint Ventures: Inside America's Almost Legal Marijuana Industry, published by Wiley & Co. in 2010.
In 2011, Trish went back to Bloomberg Television to anchor the network's afternoon market close coverage as host of Street Smart with Trish Regan. While at Bloomberg, Trish was the network's main political anchor for all political television coverage of the 2012 election, including both the Republican and Democrat conventions and the election itself. From 2013 through 2016, Trish also worked as a front-page economic columnist for USA Today, writing on the biggest trends in business, markets and the economy.
In 2015, Trish left Bloomberg Television to join Fox News and Fox Business as the anchor of her new program The Intelligence Report with Trish Regan during FBN’s market hours. She would later move to an evening program and become the only woman in cable TV at that time to host a primetime show. Trish Regan Primetime grew 8pm ratings to a level never before seen at Fox Business.
While at Fox, Trish Regan also anchored two Republican Presidential debates – making history as part of the first all-woman team, with colleague Sandra Smith, to anchor a Presidential debate. She also appeared as an economic and markets contributor to all Fox News programming and was also a guest anchor on Cavuto, Fox and Friends, The Five, and primetime programming. In addition, Trish anchored all primetime coverage of the 2016 Democrat and Republican conventions for Fox Business and was a co-host alongside Neil Cavuto, Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs and Stuart Varney for the network's main political events. Trish left Fox in 2020 and began work on the creation of her own digital media enterprise which debuted in August 2020. Her focus now is her own program and 76research, although she still appears regularly on other platforms both in cable news and in digital media.
Trish graduated with honors from Phillips Exeter Academy before going on to study opera at New England Conservatory and graduate cum laude with a degree in history from Columbia University. While at Exeter, Trish was the first-place winner of the Harvard Musical Association’s Competition for Excellence in Music, becoming the first singer to win the top prize since the organization was founded in 1837. She later studied opera and German at The American Institute for Musical Studies in Graz, Austria. Her operatic singing skills enabled her to represent her home state as Miss New Hampshire in The Miss America Pageant, where she won the talent competition and the first B. Wayne Award for the contestant with the most promise in the performing arts.
Trish's journalism awards have included multiple Emmy nominations for her documentary and investigative reporting. Trish was also recognized with a George Polk nomination for her long-form reporting covering the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina with a team from CNBC. While at MarketWatch in San Francisco, Trish was named SF’s Society for Professional Journalists most promising broadcast journalist.
Trish Regan was born and raised in New Hampshire. She now makes her home outside New York City with her husband and three young children.
A successful fund manager and stock picker, Rob Hordon has extensive experience investing across asset classes, sectors, geographies and strategies. With consistent emphasis on ways to preserve and grow assets and manage risk, Rob has offered guidance to thousands of financial advisors and wealth management professionals in the United States and abroad over the course of a multi-decade Wall Street career.
Rob’s professional investment career began in the late 1990s as an associate in the Equity Research department of Credit Suisse First Boston, where he covered wireless telecommunications stocks at the dawn of the mobile phone era. As a recent college graduate, Rob had a front row seat at one of the epicenters of the tech bubble. He witnessed for the first time the stock market’s potential to deliver immense value creation through innovation but also its characteristic tendency towards excess.
Rob went on to obtain his MBA from Columbia Business School, where he focused on security analysis and through his course work learned from some of the top investment practitioners in the country. Upon graduation from Columbia, he took an analyst role in the Risk Arbitrage department of a firm then called Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder Advisers, which would later be renamed First Eagle Investment Management.
For approximately seven years, Rob worked as a member of a small team that ran a hedge fund strategy focused on identifying mispriced long-short opportunities among companies involved in merger and acquisition activity. Just prior to the 2008 financial crisis, he transitioned over to First Eagle’s Global Value team under the auspices of the legendary international investor Jean-Marie Eveillard.
As an analyst on the team, Rob was responsible for initiating and covering several billion dollars of public equity investments across a wide range of industry sectors and countries. This move also reunited him with renowned Columbia Business School economist and author Bruce Greenwald, who had recently joined as Director of Research. As colleagues and mentors, Bruce and Jean-Marie would become the two most formative influences on Rob's investment career.
In 2011, Rob proposed and worked with the team to develop a new multi-asset investment strategy built around the same long-term value-oriented investment philosophy pioneered by Jean-Marie. As co-portfolio manager of the First Eagle Global Income Builder Fund, Rob was directly responsible for over a billion dollars of assets under management with a particular focus on dividend-paying stocks and credit instruments. Rob and his partner later re-created and managed this strategy at a London-based boutique investment firm, J O Hambro Capital Management, beginning in 2017.
In 2023, Rob teamed up with his longtime friend Trish Regan to form 76research, where he is Co-Founder and Chief Investment Strategist. This entrepreneurial venture merges his passion for investing, research and writing with his desire to help others benefit from the long-term wealth creation potential of the stock market.
The son of an economics professor and elementary school teacher, Rob is a proud husband and father of three whose interests include history, philosophy, sailing and world travel. He was born in New York City and grew up in northern New Jersey, where he attended local public schools.
Rob Hordon is a Chartered Financial Analyst. In addition to his MBA from Columbia Business School, he received his Bachelor’s degree in Politics from Princeton University and was awarded a Certificate in Political Theory. His senior thesis, entitled Justice without Truth: Contingency in American Moral Thought, explores how the philosophical tradition of American Pragmatism offers a roadmap out of the moral and political abyss of postmodern relativism.
Guide to Investing in the New Trump Economy
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How to Play the MAGA Sweep
Donald Trump was not only elected President on November 5, 2024, he was elected with a clear mandate. Trump delivered a landslide victory in the Electoral College and won the popular vote by millions of votes. Republicans won both the Senate and the House of Representatives.
This outcome, which came as a surprise to most pundits and market observers, is reshaping the investment landscape. The MAGA sweep will usher in consequential policy shifts along with a wide range of market-impacting political and regulatory changes.
No more gridlock
The Republicans will control both chambers of Congress for at least two years. They also have the unambiguous support of the voting public. Trump and his team find themselves in a position to implement significant reforms as they fulfill their campaign commitments.
The stock market immediately responded with enthusiasm to Trump's dominant performance. In the weeks and months leading up to the election, stocks were already edging up as Trump led in many polls and prediction markets. This momentum continued in the direct aftermath of the election results.
Trump's victory (and, perhaps just as important, Harris's defeat) is good for the stock market as a whole for two major reasons: taxes and deregulation.
Taxes
Trump intends to preserve his original tax cuts that went into effect in 2017 with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). Those provisions will expire at the end of 2025 unless extended by Congress.
During the campaign, Trump expressed support for a number of incremental tax cuts as well. These included no taxes on tips, no taxes on overtime pay, no taxes on social security and deductions related to automobile loans.
Time will tell what the exact tax code will ultimately look like but the direction of travel is clear: flat to lower tax rates on personal income, corporate income and capital gains.
Lower taxes enrich and incentivize the private sector. Consumers will be able to spend more, while households can also save more. Businesses and investors will retain more of what they earn. From a stock market perspective, all of this translates into higher earnings and higher valuations.
Trump's critics in the investment industry and financial media placed a great deal of emphasis during the campaign on his ideas around tariffs and their potentially inflationary impact. As Trump himself has noted, inflation was at low levels during his original term in office, despite the imposition of some $90 billion per year in tariffs.
Tariffs could result in higher prices for certain imported goods, but any revenue they generate can fund (potentially disinflationary) tax cuts elsewhere. As a bargaining tool, they will likely put American companies in a better position to pursue export opportunities.
Deregulation
The other key theme of Trump's pro-growth policy agenda is bringing about a more business-friendly regulatory environment. Environmental permitting is a key obstacle to all kinds of construction activity.
The Biden-Harris administration, which has placed unprecedented emphasis on carbon emissions, has made life difficult for businesses seeking to undertake capital projects across a wide range of sectors. Through legislative and administrative mechanisms, we expect the new Trump administration to reduce red tape and provide more regulatory certainty.
Mergers and acquisitions activity could pick up substantially under Trump with a more favorable outlook towards industrial regulation. It is true that there has been some support among conservatives for more aggressive antitrust enforcement, which has been largely focused on big tech and the censorship issue. Nonetheless, we would expect to see a more accepting attitude towards corporate consolidation across industries and more motivated corporate acquirers.
Lighter regulation will result in more capital investment, job growth, reduced compliance costs and greater economic output, while a reinvigorated corporate takeover environment could lend additional valuation support to many stocks.
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While the resounding MAGA victory is justifiably perceived as good for risk assets across the board, there are areas of the market where likely policy changes could have an especially meaningful impact. Investors looking to take advantage of the shifting political landscape should pay close attention to a number of specific opportunities.
Industrials
Many industrial stocks soared in the immediate aftermath of the election. Trump's agenda favors industrial companies in multiple ways.
By incentivizing more domestic production, tariffs have the potential to benefit U.S. industrial producers directly as well as their manufacturing sector customers. We expect to see stronger demand up and down the industrial supply chain. This should benefit a wide range of industrial stocks, including this top holding within our Inflation Protection Model Portfolio.
Energy
Some of the sharpest policy differences between Trump and Harris related to the energy sector. Trump begins almost every discussion of inflation and growth with a focus on expanding energy production, as captured in his favorite campaign slogan, "drill, baby, drill."
The Trump administration is likely to support a number of initiatives that will benefit oil and gas producers. The administration will also likely lend strong support to fossil fuel infrastructure providers and their suppliers, including those connected to the Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) export opportunity.
While oil and gas received a lot of attention during the campaign, Trump is also quite focused on electrical power. He has repeatedly recognized the urgent need to expand and improve the electrical grid, especially to accommodate surging power demands associated with Artificial Intelligence (AI). We recently profiled a new addition to the American Resilience Model Portfolio, a leading industrial company that is a direct play on the increasingly relevant electrification theme.
Technology
With venture capitalist JD Vance as his Vice-President and Elon Musk as a key advisor, Trump's second term may have an even more pro-technology bent than his first. Trump realizes that the tech sector is not only critical for innovation and economic growth, but there are also national security implications as the U.S. competes with China for dominance in the industries of the future.
Trump's support for electrical energy development, which is heavily dependent on natural gas and nuclear power, is directly tied to his desire to support U.S. leadership in AI. Companies like Digital Realty Trust (DLR), a leading data center REIT which has been a core Income Builder Model Portfolio holding since inception, is a natural beneficiary of Trump's support for AI infrastructure.
Investors in technology always need to be mindful of valuation risk, as tech investors often become "irrationally exuberant" when it comes to growth expectations. There has been a lot of discussion lately related to the S&P 500 Index having become quite expensive in a historical context. This is largely the result of a handful of companies (such as the Magnificent 7 tech platform stocks) that represent the largest holdings within the index. Stripping out these names from the index, valuation metrics are more subdued.
The rich valuations now applied to the largest market cap tech stocks point to an interesting investment debate. They are undeniably impressive companies, but for how long can they sustain such high growth rates?
Most stock market investors now have a great deal of exposure to these mega-cap names through index funds and similar investments. For this reason, we have made a deliberate decision within our Model Portfolios to focus on opportunities in technology outside of these mega-caps. There are plenty from which to chose. We recently profiled two of our core technology plays here and here.
Trump has been depicted as xenophobic, yet he has proposed automatic green cards for foreigners who graduate from American colleges. The American tech industry is desperate to hire the best talent, whether those who were born here or those who dream of citizenship. Pro-tech policy positions like these have helped Trump win over key elements of the venture capital and tech community.
Trump admires Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and wants them to continue to thrive. This is a stark contrast to Kamala Harris, who was threatening the destruction of the start-up ecosystem with ideas like taxation of unrealized capital gains, which would have rendered investment in start-ups almost unthinkable.
Crypto
Trump's speech at the Bitcoin 2024 conference should be watched by anyone who truly wants to understand his attitude towards cryptocurrency, along with tech in general. Bitcoin and other digital assets have soared following the election. This is based on Trump's explicit commitment to cryptocurrency as a critical global industry which the United States can either embrace or cede to its adversaries.
As we told subscribers prior to the election, we view digital assets like Bitcoin as high risk, high reward investments that deserve serious consideration for a prudent but meaningful allocation within an investment portfolio. The approval of Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs in early 2024 were key milestones for the crypto industry as digital assets become increasingly institutionalized and legitimized.
The crypto industry will benefit from significant regulatory and legislative support from the White House as well as the MAGA movement within Congress. There is ideological alignment around the decentralized "hard money" attributes of Bitcoin and other digital currency networks.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies should attract more capital as they continue to become mainstream financial instruments. Young investors have embraced the emerging asset class, but older investors, especially baby boomers, who control the lion's share of investable assets in the United States, are just getting their toes wet.
Small-caps
Large-cap stocks, especially mega-cap stocks like the Magnificent 7, have led the way in recent years, but smaller stocks are well-positioned to perform well, given their potentially greater sensitivity to a growing economy. The Russell 2000, a widely referenced index of small-cap stocks, has especially underperformed the S&P 500 Index since the large-cap stock rally began in late 2022.
While there are always interesting idiosyncratic opportunities among smaller companies, as an asset class, one can efficiently invest in them through low cost index funds and ETFs. Investors concerned about valuation or concentration risk in the S&P 500 Index may wish to focus on the opportunity in small-caps in this new environment.
Bonds
While stocks gained momentum in reaction to Trump's commanding victory, the reaction from long-term bond investors was more nervous. Trump's pro-growth policies may have the effect of putting upward pressure on long-term rates and reduce the need for substantial continued monetary easing by the Federal Reserve.
As investments, bonds offer stability of principal but lack upside potential and participation in economic growth. Long-term bonds can perform well when interest rates fall (typically in a recession or crisis) but face headwinds in growth environments. Investors who believe the Trump economy will deliver strong growth may wish to prioritize shorter maturity bonds over long-term bonds to minimize the risk of rising rates.
Gold
As an asset class, gold has performed quite well in recent years. Gold benefits from various drivers, including money supply growth, global central bank purchases, global private market purchases and geopolitical instability. In periods of crisis, gold has a tendency to perform especially well versus risk assets like stocks, whereas it is less likely to outperform in periods of relative calm.
While the new Trump economy seems poised to deliver growth, the U.S. fiscal position remains challenging. The long-term entitlements problem also goes largely unaddressed.
Regardless of who is in the White House, BRICS countries will likely continue to build gold reserves as they seek to extricate themselves from American financial hegemony and rotate away from U.S. Treasuries. Private households around the world, from the U.S. to China, continue to buy gold as a hedge against monetary debasement.
While we are optimistic that the new Trump era will be characterized by real economic growth and relative stability, the structural drivers of gold demand remain intact. Gold continues to offer valuable diversification benefits, especially in the context of equity-tilted portfolios. No matter who is in charge, the world and financial markets will remain inherently volatile and unpredictable. With a low and sometimes negative correlation to stocks, gold plays a unique role within any investment portfolio.
How long will the MAGA era last?
It is important to take a long-term perspective on the opportunities ahead. If Trump and team succeed in bringing about the “greatest economic comeback in American history,” as JD Vance phrased it on election night, they will likely remain in power for some time.
Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush enjoyed a 12 year run—until Bill Clinton, Ross Perot and a nasty recession put an end to it in 1992. But even Clinton, their Democrat successor, extended many of the business-friendly, growth-oriented Reagan-Bush policies. Clinton was also constrained by a Republican House that was led by Newt Gingrich and then Dennis Hastert for most of his two terms.
The 1980s and 1990s were exceptional decades in which to be a stock market investor. From 12/31/1979 through 12/31/1999, the S&P 500 Index delivered an annualized compound rate of return of 19%. To be fair, the tech crash followed almost immediately as year 2000 began. Nevertheless, it was an incredible run that was made possible by deregulation, moderate taxation, subdued inflation and technological innovation.
When American capitalism is given the opportunity by the government to flourish, it usually does. In his victory speech, Donald Trump promised a new "golden age" of peace and prosperity. We find ourselves at a moment in history with enormously impactful technological innovations underway and motivated growth-oriented leadership in the federal government.
There are, as always, plenty of risks to worry about, but investors have plenty of good reasons to feel optimistic about the future.
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