So the big day is finally here and Donald Trump will be officially sworn in later today amid the pomp and ceremony of his Presidential inauguration. Shares has been following the story closely, as most of us have, and we have hinted several times where investment might flow to the benefit of UK listed companies and selected funds and investment trusts.
We explained way back in October (read here), ahead of the election result, that there were some obvious areas of interest for UK investors.
Several construction and defence businesses should do well under a Trump administration and we steered readers to look closely at British defence firm BAE Systems (BA.), while the soon-to-be President's election promises of more money for big infrastructure projects could well filter down to contracts wins for the likes of plant hire firm Ashtead (AHT) and road building materials group CRH (CRH).
There is also background noise that Trump may favour US domestic banks, oil and mining service firms and technology companies. Possible beneficiaries on the UK market include oil services firm Hunting (HTG), although it is difficult at this stage to pinpoint direct UK tech winners. Still, we firmly believe 2017 will be a good year for the tech space in general, for selected, high-quality companies, and our best ideas appear here.
And of course, there's little chance of price caps for medicines under Trump, something Hilary Clinton promised, which would appears supportive for the trio of UK-listed pharma giants, although we prefer Shire (SHP) (read here) or AstraZeneca (AZN) to GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) right now.
As we predicted, US equities have rallied post Trump's election victory - the Dow Jones and S&P 500 indexes are up about 10% and 12% respectively since. Wide exposure to ongoing stock market firmness Stateside can be gained easily and relatively cheaply by buying a US fund. Good examples include BlackRock North American Equity Tracker Fund L Acc (GB00B7QK1Y37) and the CF Miton US Opportunities B Acc (GB00B8278F56).
