President Obama made one of history's greatest stock market calls in March 2009
Barack Obama is having a pretty good day. On Thursday, the Supreme Court voted in favor to uphold the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.
You could argue that he's having a pretty good presidency overall. On comedian Marc Maron's podcast on Monday, he listed a bunch of things he accomplished while in office, including "restore people's 401ks."
A big part of people's 401ks being restored is the comeback of the stock market, which continues to trade near all-time highs.
US presidents don't usually talk about stocks. But when they do, everyone listens. Because, who wouldn't love to remind everyone that the President of the United States, like us, is terrible at making stock market calls.
However, it turns out that President Barack Obama made one of the most perfectly timed market calls in the history of market calls.
Back on March 3, 2009 (via Goldman Sachs), Obama said, "[W]hat you're now seeing is profit and earnings ratios are starting to get to the point where buying stocks is a potentially good deal if you've got a long-term perspective on it."
March 3 was six days before the S&P 500 hit an intraday low of 666. This was a time when naysayers were saying Obama's radicalism was killing the stock market.
At around 2,100 today, the S&P 500 is up a whopping 215% in just over six years.
So, what now?
Unfortunately, we don't pay Obama to advise on the tactical asset allocation decisions for our investment portfolios.
He did, however, offer some long-term wisdom during a July 2014 interview with CNBC's Steve Liesman.
"My estimation is you've got a lot of savvy investors out there," he said. "You got people who recognize that what goes up can come down as well. I'll leave it up to them to make determinations about whether valuations and stock prices are too high. I'm more concerned about the day-to-day fundamentals. And if we get those fundamentals right, then I'm pretty confident that we can do very well in the next decade."