As for forecasts of a Trump crash, that -- like most others -- was simply wrong.
No. 3. How can you say politics doesn’t matter to markets?
Let me be precise: Politics can and occasionally does matter to markets -- just much less than many people assume.
If I told you the president was going to be impeached, and the markets will continue to power higher for a few years, you might think I was batty. But that is what happened when Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998. The next year, the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index rose more than 21 percent, and the Nasdaq Composite Index gained more than 85 percent. Yes, it would all end badly the next year, but the impeachment was irrelevant to the dot-com bubble popping.
So too was the accusation that President Barack Obama was a Kenyan-born Marxist who was hell-bent on “Killing the Dow.” When he left office earlier this year, the Dow was about 15,000 points higher than the day he took office.
And when President George W. Bush introduced unfunded tax cuts, all I heard were complaints that the deficit would balloon, inflation would soar, and jobs would be wiped out. Two of those three things never happened, and the market rose 94 percent.
If you let your political ideology get in the way of your investing decisions, the results are never pretty.
No. 4. The Trump news flow is overwhelming. What should we do?
I think we all hoped that once the election was over, we could go back to our normal lives without the incessant parade of campaign news.
No such luck.