It has been much discussed by now that the purest way to track the state of the U.S. election in the financial markets is the change in the Mexican peso.
For example, after the FBI again cleared Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton of criminal wrongdoing over her email use, the U.S. dollar lost nearly 2 percent of its value versus the peso Monday. For many reasons, including a likely renegotiation of NAFTA by a Donald Trump administration, the peso's fate is firmly in the hands of the businessman's candidacy.
So now that the market has given us the definitive Trump barometer over the last few months in the peso let's see if we can take the analysis one step further on Election Day and find the stocks in the with the highest correlation to the currency. The goal is to find the stocks most highly correlated to either candidate.
Using hedge fund analytics tool Kensho, we looked at the correlation of all the stocks in the S&P 500 to the dollar-peso over the last three months. We looked at weekly correlation instead of daily in order to remove some of the noise.
The most interesting findings came from the "Pro-Clinton" list, the stocks with a negative correlation to the USD-MXN. Simply put, when the dollar falls in value versus the peso, indicating Clinton's chances rising and Trump's falling, these stocks historically went higher the last three months.
