lol "between 1927 and 1998" - nice, include the Depression and omit Internet bubble burst that occurred during Clinton's admin - and the next 10 years of Republican presidency. FOR THE LOSE.

You might want also study which party controlled the House and Senate. With date points for each switch of control - since Congress generally creates and orchestrates the bills and law - not the president.

Peter,

When I started reading this site several months ago I read your posts religiously. I have found your opinions to be logical and unique, something that is incredibly rare.

Unfortunately, I have lost a tremendous amount of respect for your opinion ever since you have started posting this irrelevant political garbage. For the record, I am not a Republican, nor am I a Democrat. The content of the posts are not offensive to me as a voter, but instead as an educated investor who understands that the cause and effect relationship between party affiliation of the president and market performance is doubtful. Correlation does not necessarily imply causation.

Please stop posting political propaganda if for no other reason than that this is a blog about investing.

More partisan drivel from Peter -- even worse, it's recycled drivel. The study was done in 2003. What does Investopedia say about study? "Overall, the small size of the sample (just 18 administrations) brings the results into question. .... The results of the study, while intriguing, remain inconclusive. While the numbers are certainly real, the correlation may be spurious. In their own words, the authors acknowledge that "it might just be the case that we have stumbled upon a variable that tests significantly even when there is actually no underlying relation between the presidency and the stock market.""

All by himself, without the help of humanity or nature or gods or Congress, the President controls the economy, the weather, the course of war, the whereabouts of Bin Laden, human behavior, and so much more. I can see clearly now why we need a god-king and not an ordinary man. The only thing political parties do is bray about which man shall be king.

Unemployment 6 percent.Stock market heading south.Gas 4 dollars a gallon and the ranks of the working poor growing.National debt more than doubled in the last 8 years and government bailling out crocked investment banks.Grocery prices soaring and 10 billion a month spend on a war that was started with lies.Cant wait to hear how the Republicans spin their record to blame the Democrats for this mess.

Stock market performance looking a little better during Democratic presidents is a lie mentioned by Democrats using too little superficial unreliable statistics as always. The truth is that stock market has nothing to do with president and that Republican presidents cut tax to plant a seed to revive economy that Democrats destroyed already, and then when another always immoral Democratic president come along, he takes the credit guilefully the reviving economy from the seed that Republican president planted and destroy again the economy by increasing tax. This cycles keep repeating. Thanks. Intai Cheong,Richmond Hill, GA

You are such a liberal hack and not worth reading, stop trying to sway trader's opionion's for your own political wants!

Bill Clinton may have not been responsibble for the stock market (possible more to do with Greenspan than anything else), but Bush is responsible for the worst government budget deficit ever!

I can't believe you people are so blind to this. Hell, I'm a Ron Paul supportor and I don't really like the Democrats, but the current republicans aren't conservatives anymore and are ruining the economy by printing money to fund a useless war. Personally, my argument is its best to have a democratic president and a republican congress so that government pork doesn't get through as fast because the two sides are constantly gridlocked and prevented from interfering with the economy on a grand scale. That, my friends, is why the booms happened in the late 90s.

Readers (on both sides of the issue) may have interest in the original work cited by Mr. Cohan. It is available as free download from SSRN at

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=244728

Steve Sheehan
Director of Marketing and Subscriptions
Center for Research in Security Prices
http://www.crsp.uchicago.edu/

Good points, all. A hundred years of aggregate results is meaningless - mostly because whenever the Dark Side is in power, the weather is bad and evil barefoot sand people are stockpiling rocks to throw along with WMD's that can't be found during a normal 8-year term. Everybody knows that dems are bad because Clinton tried to get away with defining sex as a strictly reproductive activity, and worse, when his administration turned over power to the guy who was appointed to his position by his own father's Supreme Court, they committed Federal Crimes by stealing the W's out of the computer keyboards.