Determining how certain historical events impact the stock market is essentially impossible. There’s no way to separate one from another, and correlation is not causation. So if your desire is to simply identify the stocks that are surefire winners in an election year just by looking at past performance, you might be making a big mistake by assuming that consistent performance every four years is anything other than a coincidence. However, that doesn’t mean that trends are definitely not rooted in something you could apply to your own portfolio.
If you take the current list of companies in the S&P 500 and examine their performance in election years going back to 2000, you do have five different data points to look at. And there are five companies that have actually posted a gain in each of the last five election cycles. Here are those six companies along with their performance in each election year, as well as 14 other companies that have the largest cumulative gains over those five years in spite of at least one having a negative return.
Last updated: Sept. 22, 2020
