If you could go back in time to the day of the 2024 US election \u2014 armed with $10,000 and everything you know now \u2014 how much money could you make in the stock market?<\/p>\n
That is the challenge we set Times readers last week. Buy and sell any stock in the S&P 500 or the FTSE 100 and jump forward in time, watching how the actions of the Trump administration have affected global markets. You can play it here<\/a>.<\/p>\n So, how did readers get on as stock market traders?<\/p>\n The average player managed to turn their $10,000 investment into about $14,000 over the eight simulated months, meaning that they generated $4,000 profit \u2014 a return of 40 per cent. <\/p>\n This is a pretty good return, even if readers knew exactly what would happen: $10,000 invested in the S&P 500 would have returned $10,787, and the same in the FTSE 100 would have resulted in $11,095 \u2014 although $10,000 in bitcoin, turning into $16,931, would have beaten the lot.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s tariffs resulted in a frenzy of trading, helping Barclays to a 23 per cent jump in pre-tax profits in the first half of the year. <\/p>\n There are, of course, some objectively \u201cbetter\u201d stocks to pick. The US AI firm Palantir, co-founded by the Trump ally Peter Thiel, has more than tripled its value since the election. Other US AI firms and computer chip manufacturers (such as Super Micro Computer Inc and Jabil Inc) have also experienced strong growth, as well as companies in AI adjacent sectors, particularly energy stocks such as the General Electrics power spin-off GE Vernova Inc, which has benefited from increased demand from AI data centres.<\/p>\n \u2022 The cheap and easy way to invest (without the risk)<\/a><\/p>\n A significant number of readers wisely put all their money into Palantir, yielding returns of 200 per cent. But the highest profits were for those who traded repeatedly at optimum times. Only two players turned their $10,000 into more than $100,000; at the time of writing, the top score was an eye-watering $441,681.<\/p>\n The highest possible score, buying the best performing stock day after day, was well over a trillion dollars. Compounding returns, to paraphrase Albert Einstein, really are the eighth wonder of the world.<\/p>\n For data privacy reasons, we don\u2019t know which stocks the top performer picked. However, on average, those who played did not opt for high-risk, high-reward US tech stocks. In fact, most readers put their money into recognisable UK companies that had a track record of doing well. <\/p>\n Readers rightly focused on UK defence stocks such as Rolls-Royce, BAE and also Babcock, the best performing FTSE 100 company during the period. All those stocks boomed after Trump\u2019s realignment of global defence.<\/p>\n