Been digging into something interesting about how the stock market actually performs depending on who's in the White House, and it's kind of a wild story.

So the S&P 500 has been around since March 1957, and over that entire period it's compounded at 7.4% annually. But here's where it gets weird - when you look at the stock market performance by president chart, you see this crazy split in the data.

Democratic presidents averaged 9.8% annual returns, while Republican presidents averaged 6%. Sounds like a clear winner, right? Except not really. When you flip to the median numbers instead of averages, Republicans suddenly come out ahead at 10.2% versus 8.9% for Democrats. So basically both parties can look at the exact same historical data and claim the stock market does better under their leadership. It's actually kind of hilarious how the statistics work out.

But here's the thing nobody talks about - and this is the real insight - the president doesn't actually control the stock market. Yeah, they influence fiscal policy, but Congress writes the budget. And honestly, the stock market gets hit by way bigger forces. Remember the dot-com crash? The 2008 recession? COVID? None of those were caused by any president, but they all tanked stocks regardless of who was in office.

What actually drives stock prices is business fundamentals - earnings, revenue growth, that kind of thing. Those get influenced by policy, sure, but they're not controlled by it.

Looking at the past 30 years or so, the S&P 500 returned around 1,920% with dividends reinvested, averaging about 10.5% annually. That's across multiple presidents, multiple recessions, multiple boom cycles. So unless something fundamentally breaks in the economy, you'd expect similar returns going forward regardless of which party controls the White House.

The takeaway? Stop listening to candidates claim they'll make the stock market boom. History shows that patient investors who just stay invested through different administrations do fine. The market's bigger than any one president.