How Trump’s stock market ranks in his first 30 days in office

This article was sourced from Market Watch. Article by Mark DeCambre.

Much has been made of the stock market’s record-setting performance since President Donald Trump won the race for the White House back in November.

But Dow Jones’s data team offers more insight into how Trump stacks up compared with other presidents in their first 30 days in office, a milepost Trump hits on Feb. 19. The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +0.02% has returned 4.02% as of Friday’s close, which would make the Dow’s performance in the Trump era’s first month the sixth best in percentage terms behind Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945, after his fourth victorious campaign for the presidency, when blue chips climbed by 4.1%.

Source: Dow Jones data

Trump’s Dow performance marks the fifth best gain in history in percentage terms (in the first 30 days), according to Dow Jones data, and the third best such performance for a first-term president.

As for the S&P 500 SPX, +0.17% that benchmark index has advanced 3.5% in the month since Trump took the oath of office. That represents the best 30-day stretch since the days following the second inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1997, when the broad-market gauge ran up 4.6% (see table below):

Source: Dow Jones data

Lately, Trump has been grousing that critics are too focused on Mike Flynn, his national-security adviser who stepped down amid a scandal about his conversations with Russian officials, and Andy Puzder, the president’s pick to head up the Labor Department who withdrew his name from consideration, and not sufficiently cheering what some refer to as the Trump rally:

President Trump likes to tout the fact that the Dow and Nasdaq Composite Index COMP, +0.41%have risen 12.1%, and the S&P 500 is up nearly 10% since the Nov. 8 election.

On Friday, stocks resumed their record-setting ways, with all three equity-market benchmarks finishing at all-time highs, capping a boffo week for U.S. equities.

Still, there is some sense that the Trump rally, inspired by campaign promises of increased spending on infrastructure, reduced taxes and loosened regulations may be more apt to run out of steam than go higher—at least until he delivers hard-and-fast details of business-related policies.

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