The Election Is Here. Here's What's Next.

I was on Ausbiz on Monday talking about the US election and what investors can expect. And it's finally here. I hear a lot of people talking about the changes investors should make to their portfolio depending on the outcome of the election. What edge to investors have? How much does it really matter? And what can we learn from 125 years of data? Here's what the data tell us.

Fact number 1: The stock market tends to go up during most presidencies. I also wrote about this last week.

Fact number 2: Over long periods of time buy-and-hold has trounced a strategy of investing in only republican/democratic administrations.

And here's how stocks have done following the last 24 elections. What really stands out is how well stocks have done after the last 10 elections. Higher 80% of the time 3 and 6 months later, and higher 90% of the time 1 year later with an average return of 15.2%

Historically, mixing politics with investing has been a bad idea. The president doesn't control the stock market. Take the longview.