How Do Trump's Dow Records Stack Up?

U.S. stock markets have been breaking records lately. President Donald Trump has noticed, and he's worried that perhaps you haven't. As he tweeted on Tuesday:

The numbers the president cites (accurately, except for the part about Election Day being six months ago) are the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which closed above 22,000 for the first time ever on Wednesday. The part of the mainstream media that I work in, the financial media, actually does mention these all-time highs whenever they happen, although it doesn't make a huge deal out of them given that they've been occurring pretty frequently over the past four-plus years. When the Dow set its first record in 5 1/2 years on March 5, 2013, that was news, as it was when the Standard & Poor's 500 Index did the same a few weeks later. One more all-time high in a succession of all-time highs is by definition a lot less newsworthy.

That said, the stock market's big gains in the nearly nine months since Election Day (the Dow was up 20.1 percent as of Wednesday's close) and 6 1/2 months since the inauguration (up 11.6 percent) are noteworthy. This bull market has been getting lots of attention in the financial media (where it's usually referred to as the "Trump bump"), and it would probably be getting more play in the rest of the media if Trump himself weren't constantly creating so much other news to cover. Still, I thought it might be useful to pay it some attention by putting it in context. That is, how does the market's performance so far during the Trump era compare with what it did under past presidents?

I opted to use the Dow Jones Industrial Average as my metric, as Trump did. Yes, it's narrow and primitive. Yes, the S&P 500 is better and the Russell 3000 better yet -- and, perhaps ominously, both of those indexes actually stopped going up two weeks ago even as the Dow continued to rise. But over time, all these market measures do head in more or less the same direction. Plus, the Dow average has been calculated daily going all the way back to May 1896, allowing us to track the number of new all-time stock market highs during every presidency since that of William McKinley: