bring this chart to your Thanksgiving dinner

If you’re anything like me, and your family is anything like mine, you will have a few strident (or inebriated) relatives at your family get together next week who want to talk about politics. Some of them will want to bring up the gains in the Dow Jones or S&P 500 as evidence of this policy’s or that politician’s inherent greatness.

No matter what side you’re on, you’re going to be able to blow everyone’s doors off with this one, via my friend Jeff Kleintop at Schwab. It comes from his new post, 5 Reasons Investors Should Give Thanks. Despite all of President Trump’s record-setting amount of legislative success this year, he probably had close to nothing to do with the gains in your portfolio this year.  And the proof is that virtually every stock market around the world has been rallying, and he is not the president in most of those countries.

Bring this stat to Thanksgiving dinner and amaze your family and friends (who get most of their news from television):

Stocks up every month

This is the only year that the global stock market has posted a gain every single month in the 30 year history of the MSCI AC World Index, as you can see in the table of monthly returns below.

2017’s uninterrupted and unprecedented streak of monthly gains for global stocks

Monthly performance of MSCI AC World Index.
Source: Charles Schwab, Factset data as of 11/1/2017.

Global stocks may be on their way to posting a gain every month in 2017. For November, stocks are up month-to-date and history shows that December has been the most consistently positive month of the year, although of course history is no guarantee of future performance.

Josh here – now, of course, there will be people at the table who don’t care about these facts. These people are unreachable so allow them to enjoy their stuffing and opioids in peace. Reasonable people, however, will appreciate this context, regardless of their political leanings.

Now go read the rest of Jeff’s thing, it’s really good.

Source:

5 Reasons Investors Should Give Thanks (Charles Schwab)