Russ Koesterich and Chief Investment Strategist

Dow Industrials DJIA: Russ Koesterich, chief investment strategist at Black Rock, referenced the chart below in his weekly outlook Wednesday: Caption outside of wrapper for normal article images While Democratic presidents are often credited with presiding over better stock-market returns than their Republican counterparts, Koesterich argued that the difference isn’t statistically significant, according to Market Watch. We start with 114 years of Dow Industrials DJIA, +0.49% annual price returns. Just don’t trade on them. While U.S. stocks have done modestly better when a Democrat has occupied the White House, the effect is dwarfed by the normal variation in annual equity market returns, he wrote. But this, too, withers under scrutiny, Koesterich says: This concept seems to have its genesis in the extraordinary equity market performance of the late 1990s, a period when U.S. equities regularly produced annual double-digit returns. Koesterich also trains his sights on the widely held market belief that a divided government—a Democratic president and a Republican Congress, or vice versa—is better for stocks. (news.financializer.com). As reported in the news.