The Positive Trade When Incumbent Presidents Run For Re-Election

(This is an excerpt from an article I originally published on Seeking Alpha on July 2, 2012. Click here to read the entire piece.)

S&P Capital IQ’s Sam Stovall appeared on Nightly Business Report on Friday, June 29, 2012 to provide some statistics on how the stock market tends to perform in the second half of the year. Here are the statistics he provided going back to 1900 {snip}…



The statistics on pre-election performance really caught my attention because I know that incumbents rarely lose U.S. Presidential elections. This fact was part of my case last year arguing that insufficient data exist to usefully correlate the unemployment rate to the outcome of Presidential elections. So, I decided to take a closer look at Stovall’s analysis on pre-election results.

{snip} It turns out that since 1950 this period tends to perform very well in election years and even better when an incumbent is running for re-election.

{snip}


Performance of the S&P 500 From July 31st to October 31st Every Year Since 1950
Performance of the S&P 500 From July 31st to October 31st Every Year Since 1950

The performance of the pre-election period has been stellar in election years since 1952. {snip}


Performance of the S&P 500 From July 31st to October 31st During Election Years
Performance of the S&P 500 From July 31st to October 31st During Election Years

{snip}


Performance of the S&P 500 From July 31st to October 31st During Election Years With A Running Incumbent
Performance of the S&P 500 From July 31st to October 31st During Election Years With A Running Incumbent

Source for data: Yahoo!Finance

What I particularly like about these results is that they add one more support to my conclusion that traders should buy the dips going forward. {snip}

Be careful out there!

(This is an excerpt from an article I originally published on Seeking Alpha on July 2, 2012. Click here to read the entire piece.)

Full disclosure: long SDS

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