caveats

I’ve been a subscriber to Morningstar’s stock analysis service for a while. To my mind, it has a very solid value-oriented approach to the US stock market, with information that’s solid and can be relied on. Analysts don’t appear to me to be steeled by the daily trial-by-fire that tempers their brokerage house peers, but they also don’t have the attached baggage of the need to maintain investment banking ties with the companies under coverage.

I should probably also mention that in the late 1980s, Morningstar summarily rejected my offer to buy 10% of it, and that I’ve received awards from Morningstar for the investment performance of my equity funds.

the politics part

In a newsletter today, Morningstar recounts a study by the Bespoke Investment Group. Starting with $1000 in 1953, you’d have:

–$27,000+ if you held the S&P 500 when Republicans were in power and switched to cash when Democrats controlled Washington

–$61,000+ if you held the S&P 500 when Democrats were in power and cash under Republicans

—$1.7 million if you held the S&P throughout.

the counterarguments, i.e., that this time is different.

There are, I think, two:

–Holocaust scholars/survivors point to parallels between conservative politicians and the religious right in today’s US and the national socialists in 1930s Germany

–the large amounts of money that appear to be flowing into Trump family enterprises from foreign countries (leaving the Clintons in the dust, as one commentator put it); and the unresolved question of whether the seizure of secret documents from Trump was triggered by the realization that the information in some of them had come into the hands of hostile nations.