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Is Beating the Market a Lot Easier than We Thought?
A simple experiment shows the risks and benefits of partisan investing
“I’m sorry, hon. You were right.”
I cringed as I watched our investment accounts get decimated in real time. My wife was seething. She had wanted to sell a big chunk of our stocks and mutual funds as soon as Trump got elected, using the proceeds to pay off our mortgage, or at least put them in CDs where they might earn a healthy bit of interest. She didn’t want to be exposed to Trump Unleashed.
“You can’t time the market,” I’d told her back in January, aping the sage advice that everyone from our financial advisors to our economics professors to our grandmothers had always given us.
Were they wrong?
I’ve written several articles about how Democrats tend to outperform Republicans when it comes to a host of economic metrics, from unemployment to gross domestic product to, yes, stock market growth. So now I was starting to wonder, maybe beating the market didn’t require a patented system or fancy math. Maybe it just boiled down to investing in the political party with the best track record for good economic governance.
