Justin Fox, Columnist

Trump’s Stock Market Record Is Still Great

It’s not the true measure of a president, but the Dow’s two-year gain since he was elected puts him second only to FDR.

November 15, 2018 at 2:30 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

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Photographer: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

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President Donald Trump and his supporters spent a lot of time talking about the stock market during the first year or so after his election. Lately, not so much. With the Dow Jones Industrial Average and Standard & Poor’s 500 Index both down more than 5 percent since early October and up less than 1.5 percent year to date, that’s understandable.

But with more than two years now having passed since Americans elected Trump on Nov. 8, 2016, it seems like an appropriate time to revisit the stock market’s performance since that weird and fateful day. How does it compare, I wondered, with the first two years after the initial election of past presidents?