HEXUS.sharewatch post-election special

We took a snapshot of shares 24 hours ago in order to be able to see how investors react to the result of the US Presidential election.

In the lead up to the election shares has been rallying a fair bit but today, after Obama was announced as the clear winner, the Dow and the NASDAQ both dived by five percent, taking most of our list with them.

Surely this couldn't have been a response to the result as Obama was the clear favourite to win. But maybe this was a hangover from the fervour the preceded the big day, as everyone realised that Bankageddon and all the problems associated with it aren't suddenly going to go away just because some new guy's in charge.

Looking at our list, most companies pretty much followed the herd and were down by five percent or more. Interestingly the distributors all seems to have got off relatively lightly but we'd be lying if we claimed to know why.

The one big exception to the post election dip was Yahoo!, which saw its share price go up by four percent after Google decided trying to work out an ad deal with it was too much like hard work. This reopens the possibility of Microsoft buying it, so investors are presumably thinking it might be worth having a few shares just in case.