Stocks don’t care who the president is

Tune out all the breathless talk about what Trump or Clinton could mean for stocks, says Andrew Van Sickle. The market doesn’t care who’s in the White House.

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Will she make it to the White House? The markets won't mind either way

With Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton virtually certain to be the two candidates in the American presidential election in November, talk is turning to what their presidencies might mean for equities. But investors should ignore all the analyses. Everyone presumes that whoever wins will have "a significant and immediate effect on both the economy and the markets", says Barry Ritholtz on BloombergView.com. In fact, "markets and the economy determine which candidate does well, and not the reverse".

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Andrew Van Sickle
Editor, MoneyWeek

Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.