Most investors think Trump will be better than Clinton for their portfolios
A new poll out Wednesday from Bloomberg and Morning Consult found that 50% of investors think electing Donald Trump to the White House would be better for their portfolios than Hillary Clinton, who was the choice of 33%.
Another 17% of respondents were not sure which candidate would be better for their investments. The poll noted that responses were nearly identical among investors with more than $50,000 invested and those with less.
Bloomberg and Morning Consult polled 2,001 registered voters, 945 of whom had some money in the stock market. This is a bit less than the latest Gallup data, which showed a little more than half of Americans have any money in the stock market.
And with the most recent national poll shows Clinton leading Trump by 7 points, the inference we can make here is that the roughly half of Americans invested in the stock market prefer Trump more than the general population. (This does, however, assume that those invested in the stock market care more about their investments than who ends up being elected - which I don't think is rock solid.)
We've written previously that over the last century, the stock market has "predicted" the winner of the election 19 out of 22 times. If stocks are up in the three months before the election, the incumbent party wins. Otherwise, we get a change in power.
We're still about six weeks off from the beginning of this three-month stretch.
The incumbent victory that follows a rise in the price of stocks indicates investors are generally happy to continue rolling with what's been working - if, that is, it's working.
Given that the S&P 500 has gone sideways for about two years now, perhaps the preference for Trump is an indication that investors are, more than anything else, simply looking for something new.