https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/elect...lcU?li=BBnb7Kz
Once panned by Wall Street as a socialist with crazy ideas, Sen.  Bernie Sanders is finally commanding attention from New York investors.
   
 And they don't like what they see.
Shares of the nation's  leading health insurance companies sank Monday after a handful of new  polling data showed the Vermont Independent had eclipsed longtime  frontrunner Joe Biden among Iowans one week before the state's key  Democratic caucuses.
Stocks including Anthem, UnitedHealth and  Cigna all traded down at least 2% to start the session. Molina  Healthcare, an $8 billion health insurance company based in Long Beach,  California, fell 3.1%.
"There  was a battle between Sanders and Warren on who would be the progressive  candidate. And Sanders appears to have won that battle," said Thomas  Block of Fundstrat Global Advisors. But "people I've talked to continue  to not take Bernie that seriously."
"A big win in Iowa could change that," Block added.
An  Iowa victory could trigger what Wall Street 'Bond King' Jeffrey  Gundlach labeled a Sanders "scare," warning investors earlier this month  that the biggest risk to the markets in 2020 is the Vermont senator  becoming "more believed in as a real force" that investors would have to  take more seriously.
"Bernie is stronger than people think," the  DoubleLine CEO said on Jan. 7. "I think it will be taken more seriously  as the field winnows. The financial markets broadly will have to deal  with the fact that there could be a scare that Bernie Sanders is  starting to become a plausible candidate for the nomination."
To  anyone who's opened a newspaper in the past 12 months, the fact that  health-care stocks tend to fall whenever Sanders sees his support rise  may not seem revolutionary.
His avowed opposition to the private-sector health care — and excessive profiteering in general — isn't new.
"If  we are going to break the stranglehold of corporate interests over the  health care needs of the American people, we have got to confront a  Washington culture that has let this go on for far too long," Sanders  said in July. "That is why I am calling on every Democratic candidate in  this election to join us in rejecting money from the insurance and drug  industries."
His yearslong crusade against private health  insurance and support for "Medicare for All" was a central pillar of his  2016 campaign as well.
What has changed, however, is the way Wall Street is viewing his odds.
The 
results of a New York Times/Siena College poll  released over the weekend showed his support among Iowa voters swelled  by six points since their last survey in late October, putting Sanders  well above rivals such as fellow progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren and  Biden.
Meanwhile, online betting market PredictIt shows Sanders'  odds of clinching the Democratic nomination at 40%, six percentage  points above No. 2 Biden.
Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight puts  Biden's odds of winning the nomination at 2 in 5 (42%) and Sanders' at 3  in 10 (28%). But even that represents a big bounce for Sanders, who  earlier this month saw his odds on FiveThirtyEight at less than 20%.
Investors  have for nearly two full election cycles dismissed the democratic  socialist as little more than a progressive to pull otherwise centrist  Democrats farther to the left. He was more an interesting thought  experiment and testament to the consequences of income inequality than  an actual threat at the White House.
The flurry of polling  headlines appeared enough to convince traders that they should start to  account for his chances, however remote.
That can explain two  important developments: Why Sanders' proposals to overhaul the American  health-care system haven't fazed Wall Street until now and why  health-care stocks rallied during the last three months of 2019 as Sen.  Elizabeth Warren's support waned.

© Provided by CNBC  Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), former Vice President Joe Biden, and Sen.  Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) enter the stage before the Democratic  Presidential Debate at Otterbein University on October 15, 2019 in  Westerville, Ohio. It's also noteworthy that health-care stocks have been  more responsive to changes in political polling during the 2020 election  cycle. Though bipartisanship in Washington may to some seem like a lost  cause, one area of teamwork between Republicans and Democrats is  health-care reform and mutual distrust of health insurers.
That's  important given the high likelihood that the GOP keeps the Senate in the  2020 election, meaning that a potential President Sanders or Elizabeth  Warren would have to work together with the opposition to pass domestic  policy reforms.
That's likely what's keeping the selling in  health-care equities in check along with Americans' apprehension toward  self-proclaimed socialists, Fundstrat's Block said.
"Bernie  Sanders has been an out-and-proud socialist his entire life. And I just  think Americans feel that America just is not ready to elect somebody  who proudly calls himself a socialist president of the United States,"  he said.
"The middle of America elected Donald Trump," Block  added. "And I think the Republicans, and Donald Trump in particular,  would use that label to scare the bulk of the electorate. And especially  the electorate in the four or five states whose approval will decide  the presidency."
Still, some of Wall Street's biggest investors  have already raised the alarm that stocks could see a big sell-off if  markets start to believe that Sanders could prove a meaningful political  threat to President Donald Trump.
Bond investor Gundlach said that the biggest risk to the market in 2020 is the possibility of Sanders' becoming president.
Longtime  hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller said something similar last  summer, warning that stocks could plummet if Bernie Sanders is elected  president.
"If Bernie Sanders became president, I think stock prices should be 30% to 40% lower than they are now," he said in June.
"The  good news is we'd all be much more equal because everybody would be  poorer but the rich would have lost a lot more wealth than the poor  would have," he joked.

© Provided by CNBC
Source: Jefferies, PredictIt
Similar  forecasts of doom came the second half of 2019, when Warren's rise in  the polls spurred dire predictions a major market pullback. Though  Warren has said she's a "capitalist to my bones," billionaire investors  such as Marc Lasry, Paul Tudor Jones and Leon Cooperman all predicted  that the stock market would fall 20% or more if she became president.
Fear  of Warren at the time corresponded to strikingly familiar slump for  health-care stocks. Performance analysis of the Health Care Select  Sector SPDR ETF, which tracks the performance of biotechnology and  pharmaceutical companies in the S&P 500, showed strong negative  correlation with Warren's nomination odds via PredictIt.
Bernie and Warren are Communist totalitarians who would destroy the stock market and US economy for their socialist ideology.  And institute the Soylent green new deal.  The market has reason to worry.  so does all America - they are an existential threat to representative democracy.