The stock market doesn’t care who wins

Take the 9 million gigabytes worth of election-flavored market content you’ve consumed over the last 8 weeks and flush it all completely from your brain’s hard drive. Full delete.

The stock market doesn’t actually care about who wins the election. It just wants the election to be over. So a decisive victory for either side will be the best case scenario. Look no further than the FTSE 100’s reaction to the Brexit vote and the S&P 500’s reaction to the Trump surprise – both in 2016 – to see recent examples of this sort of exhalation rally on the charts.

For every “Trump is good for taxes” argument there is a “Blue Wave is good for stimulus” comeback. For each version of the “Trump produced Animal Spirits and business confidence” lyric, there is a “But what about the trade war?” chorus. For every “Biden is anti-business” lament there is a “Trump has failed to deliver an infrastructure bill” retort. We could go back and forth forever and no one would change anyone’s mind.

So throw all of that poisonous, partisan bulls*** out the window. Don’t spend another minute on it.

Here’s the deal: We’re in a secular bull market, have been since the spring of 2013 under Obama and it continued under Donald Trump. The last secular bull market began under Reagan, continued under Bush and then flourished under Clinton, unto the point of its death by excess. This is the way all bull markets die, by the way, not by a change in the Oval Office or a war or a new tax policy. The next presidency, whether it’s Trump II or Biden the First, doesn’t represent a magical switch being thrown to end the predominant trend.

Stocks are eagerly anticipating the certainty that will come when the polls are closed and the result looks likely. Even if it might be a few weeks before we get there.