It is leap year and Wall St. is having its usual discussion of which candidate will be better for the stock market. I do not know, but it is interesting to look at the historic record. Starting with Truman makes a good comparison as Republican and Democrats have served almost the same number of years and it covers all of the post WW II era. Moreover, each party has  an admiration with two presidents –JFK & LBJ and Nixon & Ford.  In addition, each has one president that only served for four years and lost their bid for a second term.

So this comparisons shows that the average annual stock market gain under Republican has been 7.3% while under Democrats it has been more than double that at 14.9%.

The primary reason for this were the two republican presidents where the S&P 500 actually was lower when they left office than when they took office. In modern times only three presidents suffered a falling market over their entire term–Hoover, Nixon and the second Bush. On the democratic side, they have the president with the largest average returns – -Clinton. Maybe the question should be, can Hillary repeat her husband’s record?

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