STOCKS prior to Presidential election?

[DcifrThs]

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In the aggregate, 4 year presidential cycle (based on the Dow)...

Pre-Election year (3) > Election year (4) > Midterm year (2) > Post-Election year (1)

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how strong was this relationship?

obviously i am in the camp that this is mostly datamining in that i dont think the presidential process has a large effect on the market (as it shouldn't). monetary policy & economic cycles, when they overlap with presidential cycles will be the driver and correlations are thus faulty (if you are thinking about causality for forward looking bets).

far more important things in my opinion than presidential cycles. (liquidity, risk aversion, global cycles etc. are some of the drivers, not US presidential elections)

Barron

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I don't have the 2007 update, but since 1833, avg annual gain...
Post Election year: 1.6%
MidTerm year: 3.7%
Election year: 6.8%
Pre-Election year: 10.6%

"Presidential elections every four years have a profound impact on the economy and the stock market. Wars, recessions and bear markets tend to start or occur in the first half of the term; properous times and bull markets, in the latter half."

Interestingly, 8th years of "Decades" have historically also performed very well.

Disclaimer: Past performance, blah blah blah; but its still an interesting trend [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

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this is one of those things that makes me want to do some digging.

lots of questions i have now (which is good).

do you have a monthly return stream going back as far as monthly goes & annual back farther?

if not, do you have an annual return stream?

an interesting trend that means nothing really is that decades serve as VERY good deliniators of financial security performance. very odd how it works out like that but it doesn't mean that you should just trade at the end of decades.

the strength of the relationship isn't answered there though..just the magnitude (strength i mean statistical significance).

some initial thoughts:

it makes NO sense to me logically how it breaks out.

when does a president have the most power to change/direct etc. the economy? not during an election year! most likely during his (soon to also be "her" [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img] ) first year in office i'd think. the fact that the relationship's magnitude increases as the presidential's term nears an election is strange to me. unless of course there is a drag. that may make sense for economic performance (GDP etc.) but not security pricing since that tends to react faster than production stats etc. as expectations drive the pricing.

further, how does this relate to presidents who don't change. why should the market go from 10% to 2% from the 4th to the 5th year of a president who serves 2 terms.

i have a ton of questions i can think of but need the data to dig in.

lemme know if you have it [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

thanks,
Barron