Episode 68: What Works Wednesday: How Elections Impact The Stock Market

In this episode of What Works Wednesday, Leland discusses how elections historically impact the stock market. Without diving into party politics, he explains the unpredictability of markets and shares insights on making informed investment decisions during election years, while emphasizing that no one can predict the future.

Transcript:

Hello everyone. Welcome back to another episode of What Works Wednesday. I'm your host, Leland Gross. And today I want to touch a touchy subject. I want to talk about how the stock market moves in relation to elections. So how the election coming up may or may not impact the stock market. I am not going to be pushing a party. I want to just say that I'm not going to be coming into each, you know, parties, different policies and things like that. I want to talk about

how historically elections impact the stock market and what you may be able to expect in this season and thereafter. We know it's an election year. Typically that means tensions rise. Typically that means stress levels rise. And typically that means there's a lot of angst around what should I do with my investments now to prepare for the election? How is the election going to impact my investments? Things like that. And

I really wanted to just make sure that we had an episode addressing that for your education so that you can make decisions that are best for you. Now, I preface that with, I am not a wizard. I do not have a crystal ball. I can't foresee what's going to happen all the time by any means. And I think market predicting is actually relatively useless, personally. Because if you sat in January 2020 and looked at what every market predictor said was going to happen,

Can you imagine how many were correct? Very, very few, if not none. Nobody predicted the COVID pandemic. And so we always know that when we're looking forward, we just don't know what's gonna happen. We can only look at the past and look at trends and get educated on how things work. And even then, past performance is not an indication of future results. So I wanna talk through how elections impact stock markets.

I'm saying you can kind of make an educated decision for yourself knowing that I don't have a crystal ball and that is my disclosure. So in general, historically, we need to know a few things about how the market reacts to presidential terms. So core fundamental presidential like party neutrality is key to long term growth.