Welcome to the Stay Wealthy Podcast.

I'm your host, Taylor Schulte, and today we are busting myth number three.

Election years influence stock market returns.

Now, we all know that 2020 is an election year, and it's not uncommon for investors

to believe that because it's an election year, the stock market must be in for a wild ride.

Even more, some investors suggest that if the party they favor wins the election, it's going to

be good for the markets. But if the other party wins, it's going to tank them.

Now, I'm not going to pretend to be able to predict the future here, but looking back at 90

plus years of data can certainly be helpful in making informed decisions with our money and our

investments. I'll be sharing a lot of numbers and data points with you today. Lucky for you, my wife has been blasting Christmas music all week. I'm going to be a lot of numbers and data points with you today.

Lucky for you, my wife has been blasting Christmas music all week.

I'm in the Christmas spirit and feeling extra generous. So I put together this 14 page PDF with some nice charts and graphs and numbers,

documenting just about everything I reference in this episode.

To download that PDF, there's no

strings attached, just head over to you staywealthy.com forward slash 59.

Since 1928, we've had 23 election years. The first was Hoover versus Smith and and the most recent, of course, was Trump versus Clinton. I went through a bunch of data over this 90-year period, and I pulled a few interesting things that I wanted to share with you today. Out of these 23 election years, only four of them experienced a negative return for the U.S. stock market if we're measuring it

by the S&P 500. In other words, the stock market has only had a negative return during an

election year 17% of the time, 83% of the time it's been positive. The average return of the

S&P 500 during those 23 election years has been a positive

11.3%. The average return for the subsequent year, meaning that the year after the election,

has been a little bit worse, but still a positive 9.9%. The worst performing election year was in 2008, Obama versus McCain, and we were,

of course, in the middle of the Great Recession. We're all very familiar with how that ended.

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