HardAssetsInvestor

Written by Amine Bouchentouf  |

October 24, 2012

The Commodity Investor: US Presidential Election History Suggests This Is Good Time To Buy Gold

Details

Gold reacts more positively to post-election certainty and stability than to who’s in the office.

With the presidential election only a few weeks away, the American electorate is being bombarded on an hourly and daily basis by information (some of it accurate, most of it not).

With so much information out there, it can be very confusing for investors (as well as voters) to determine what’s relevant from what’s frivolous and what’s accurate from what’s misleading. In this week’s column, The Commodity Investor will examine the current state of political and economic affairs and provide some insight into the coming election and what it means for your portfolio.

Before we delve into specifics, we have to ask the all-important question: Do presidential elections affect the markets?

Unfortunately, while this is a straightforward question, the answer is not as simple as investors would like. For example, while studies show that the stock market performs better under Republicans during the first year after an election, studies also show that the market performs better during the overall four years under a Democratic president.

Specifically, markets increase 75 percent of the time under a Republican president versus 58 percent of the time under a Democratic president during the first year of office. However, during the total four-year term in office, markets perform better under Democrats than under Republicans by a factor of almost 2-to-1.

Those figures may change depending on several external factors. For example, it depends if the incumbent party loses or wins a second term. Markets decidedly favor stability and tend to perform much better during the second term of an incumbent president rather than the first term of an incoming president.

Specifically, markets have historically increased by 15 percent if the incumbent president wins a second term versus a drop of 5 percent if the incumbent president loses.

So all in all, it would seem that markets favor incumbent Democratic presidents in the long term. However, this isn’t an exact science. There are so many other political factors that have to be taken into consideration, such as the political control of both houses of Congress, fiscal policy and budgetary planning.

The bottom line is that presidential elections do have an effect on the markets and your portfolio, but it is not an exact science. Therefore, The Commodity Investor does not recommend taking portfolio decisions solely on the basis of presidential politics—it is an additional metric to use, but certainly not the only one.