34 stocks ready to outperform if Donald Trump retakes the White House and implements an ‘America First’ policy, according to Goldman Sachs

For the first time since the 1890s, the two major candidates contending for the White House have already been president, so investors have already seen how stocks perform under each.

However, using past returns to predict how markets will perform if Joe Biden or Donald Trump gets a second term is like driving a car by looking through the rearview mirror, especially because the pandemic-induced crash and subsequent recovery skewed everything.

Trump’s tariffs would lift US-focused firms

While the 2024 elections are still months away, this week’s presidential debate promises to bring the Biden-Trump rematch to the forefront of the national conversation — including in markets.

Even though the S&P 500 has risen under Trump and Biden, the candidates’ policy differences will likely have a significant impact on which stocks outperform, according to Goldman Sachs.

David Kostin, the firm’s chief US equity strategist, wrote in his latest weekly note that this fall’s winner will lead to swings in the US dollar. That may have massive implications on companies, helping or hurting them based on whether they generate their revenue from the US or abroad.

A Trump win, which prediction markets are currently pricing in, would almost certainly lead to higher tariffs, which are taxes on imports. Trump has advocated for 10% tariffs on foreign goods.

Economists disagree about whether these tariffs would be a net positive or negative since they may boost government revenue and protect American jobs while making consumer goods more expensive, possibly risking an inflation spike and even an economic growth slowdown.

“Based on the 2018-19 experience, tariffs would likely lift consumer prices, and could potentially boost government revenues, but the impact on economic growth is less clear,” Kostin wrote.

Higher tariffs would also strengthen the US dollar relative to other currencies. This would benefit US-based firms that record virtually all of their sales domestically but hurt global companies that sell many of their goods overseas.

“Tariffs would create a headwind to the performance of stocks with high international revenue exposure due to the risk of retaliatory tariffs as well as heightened geopolitical tensions,” Kostin wrote.

Companies with a significant international presence have come under pressure compared to stocks mostly selling in the US as markets start to price in the potential impact of Trump’s tariffs.

When Trump started a trade war with China in 2018 by levying tariffs on their goods, companies in Goldman Sachs’ domestic sales basket beat those in the international sales basket by nine percentage points and stocks in the China sales group by 15 percentage points.

Still, it’s too soon to ditch international-focused stocks, which beat their domestic-heavy peers by nine percentage points in the year after Trump won the 2016 election and remain ahead by over 5 percentage points so far in 2024 despite lagging recently. But that’s due to an excellent stretch from semiconductor stocks; otherwise, their year-to-date relative returns would be in line.

From a growth standpoint alone, it would seem as if international-oriented companies are in a strong position to outperform heading into next year, with inflation-adjusted US GDP growth expected to slow from 2.6% this year to 2.2% in 2025 and European GDP growth forecast to rise from 0.8% to 1.4%, according to Goldman Sachs.

However, Kostin noted that there’s no viable challenger to the US dollar’s relative strength, which should continue to give a relative boost to shares of US-focused firms.

34 US-focused stocks to own

Trump’s so-called “America First” agenda appears to be a tailwind for companies that generate most or all of their sales in the US, according to Goldman Sachs.

Kostin and his colleagues recently highlighted their domestic sales basket, which comprises 50 stocks in the S&P 500 with that description. Within that group, there are 34 companies that Goldman Sachs said generated 0% of their revenue from outside the US in the last year.

Below are 34 stocks that are set to outperform if Trump wins and implements tariffs, along with each stock’s ticker, market capitalization, sector, and revenue from the previous 12 months.