The Dow Jones Is a Useful, If Underused, Roadmap

President Donald Trump likes to tweet about the performance of stocks this year, most recently noting at the start of the month that the Dow Jones Industrial Average was on the cusp of reaching 22,000 and another record high. The implication is that the gains are a direct result of Trump’s performance and policies. But do U.S. presidents really drive equity market valuations? I suspect many investors would welcome such a paradigm if it actually worked.

In calling out the Dow, though, he is backing the right horse. The benchmark has racked up an almost 2,100-point gain this year, rising 10.6 percent. Main Street’s favorite measure of U.S. stock market performance has beaten Wall Street’s preferred metric -- the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index -- by more than 150 basis points in 2017, and the gulf is even wider over the last year at 590 points.