Making Sense of the Market
November 27, 2012
When I appeared on Canada’s Business News Network last week, Randy Cass challenged my thinking that it’s the best time of the year for stocks. Rather than focusing on short-term factors that may be impacting the markets, I prefer following bigger historical patterns, such as the fact that the timeframe between November and January has resulted in the largest gains for the S&P 500 Index.
Take another cycle that we track here at U.S. Global Investors: the presidential cycle. In March 2009, President Barack Obama injected $700 billion dollars into the economy. We’ve also seen three rounds of quantitative easing in the U.S. You can see the result of this easing below, as the performance of the S&P over the last four years under Obama has been one of the best over the past 50 years of any president, defying the odds of what people thought about the market.
I concluded by saying, “When you take a look at this quarter and you go back over the last 100 years of data points, mathematically it favors a rising market even in a looming difficulty taking place with the fiscal cliff.”
We also discussed investors’ selling of stocks, China’s improving HSBC Manufacturing Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) data, the possibility of Greece exiting the eurozone, and a weakening of Europe’s currency. Watch the clip now.
By clicking the link above, you will be directed to a third-party website. U.S. Global Investors does not endorse all information supplied by this website and is not responsible for its content. The S&P 500 Index is a widely recognized capitalization-weighted index of 500 common stock prices in U.S. companies. The HSBC China Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) is a composite indicator designed to provide an overall view of activity in the manufacturing sector and acts as a leading indicator for the whole economy. The PMI is based on new orders, output, employment, suppliers’ delivery times, stock of items purchased.
