Stock Market Returns by Presidential Party

OK, I said the previous link on this “stock market returns by presidential party” thing was the last one, but this one is way too good to pass up. Theodore Gray, co-founder of Mathematica, used Mathematica to create a very rich interactive model. He plays with the data in different ways, like by assuming that it takes a full year for a president to have any effect on the market, factoring in dividends, and by factoring in inflation (in which case the data looks really good for Republican presidents).

Gray has convinced me that this is not a good metric for measuring presidential economic policies, and his conclusion is too good to spoil.

(Thanks to Andreas Weiler for the link.)

★ Thursday, 16 October 2008