#44 – Election Indicators, Market Predictions, Stem Cell Research, and Staying Invested

Jeff Lloyd [00:01:04]:
I wouldn’t say I got an extra hour of sleep. I kind of woke up at the same time and it just happened to be an hour later.

Wes Moss [00:01:10]:
It happened to be later.

Jeff Lloyd [00:01:12]:
Happened to be later.

Wes Moss [00:01:12]:
We turned our clocks back, which makes it a little easier get up. But that extra hour, I guess really, it’s really an extra hour of darkness, isn’t it?

Jeff Lloyd [00:01:22]:
It really is.

Wes Moss [00:01:23]:
Even though technically it’s not the whole.

Jeff Lloyd [00:01:25]:
And it gets darker earlier in the afternoon, evening. I just want to go on record, not a huge fan of daylight savings.

Wes Moss [00:01:32]:
And that says a lot because Jeff Lloyd is such a positive individual. It’s rare that you ever find anything that he doesn’t like. But turns out that’s on the list.

Jeff Lloyd [00:01:40]:
It’s not worth that one day of an extra hour of sleep, in my opinion.

Wes Moss [00:01:45]:
It does feel as though, yeah. When it’s like 5:30 and it’s already almost dark, it’s no good. And he likes that it creates a.

Jeff Lloyd [00:01:51]:
Little extra traffic in the Atlanta area. When it gets darker earlier, the traffic to me, in my opinion, gets a little bit worse. I still think of it as driving home in darkness.

Wes Moss [00:02:00]:
I think it because of the mall, even though I know people don’t go to the mall. My commute, which is from Sandy Springs back to Midtown area, I have PTSD around holiday shopping traffic. And you’re going through 400 and you’re trying to get through where where Lenox Mall would be and Phipps Mall would be. And even though people don’t technically shop at stores anymore, it certainly doesn’t feel that way during the holidays.

Jeff Lloyd [00:02:29]:
There is still mall traffic. And hey, it’s November now. It’s holiday season. You got Thanksgiving coming up, then it’ll be Christmas, Hanukkah I mean, a lot.

Wes Moss [00:02:37]:
Of holidays coming up and an election, who knows when we’re going to know the results. Could be Wednesday, could be Thursday, could be a week after that, we don’t know. But what is interesting, and we’ve tracked this obviously throughout the course of the year and there’s a lot around what markets do at different political configurations. We did a study to see what markets do post election. We’ve looked at indicators that historically point to which party wins, the incumbent or the non incumbent party. And then there’s a whole new layer of, I guess, indication or indicators, which is the betting market. We haven’t talked a whole lot about that. But the way I’d sum this up is that essentially the big trusty indicators and none of them, these are perfect historically.

Wes Moss [00:03:27]:
And of course betting markets are not perfect, but they do have solid track records. Like The S&P 500 indicator has been a really strong track record. The misery index has been a really strong track record. And, but, but they’re not perfect. So none of them are have a 100% track record. And of course betting markets don’t either. But I think if I were to sum up where we are today is that the different betting markets, and there’s a lot of them and I kind of went down a rabbit hole this week, I never use them. From my understanding, much of the betting is outside the United States, which in itself kind of makes a.

Wes Moss [00:04:06]:
Makes you question how accurate these are. If it was really just a bunch of US people betting 10 bucks or 20 bucks, then I could see it being very predictive. But when so much of the money, because most of this is, well, it’s in a cryptocurrency, you’ve got these big online marketplaces where you can bet on anything. And I think they are good indicators, but they’re certainly not perfect. And you’ve got Poly Market is one of them. You’ve got Predicted is another one. And you’ve got Kalshi, it’s spelled K A L S H I. And billions of dollars have been bet on these elections.

Wes Moss [00:04:46]:
I mean the poly market, it’s something like a billion and a half just on. It’s more than that just on the presidential election, if you look through. So again, I don’t recommend anybody using these or betting on them. And I don’t even know if you can in the United States. I certainly haven’t. I don’t know anyone who has. But you can also bet. And for an example with polymarket, the.

Wes Moss [00:05:09]:
You can not just the winner of the election but the popular vote winner which of course those two could be different. Super bowl champs 2025 right now, who’s in the lead? The Chiefs and the Lions are the top two. But you can bet on virtually any team the balance of power. So looking at the the House and the Senate, the Champions League winner, La Liga winner, the highest grossing movie in 2024 right now I guess it looks like it’s going to be tough to catch inside out too because we’re already late in the season. Jeff Floyd I don’t know if you saw that and then fed interest rates, whether they go up down. So you can and this is just the very small window into how many different things you can bet on with these what essentially are markets. So you don’t necessarily have to wait until the outcome and win or lose. So the way I understand these work is essentially you get a dollar if you win the contract and you get zero if you lose the contract.

Wes Moss [00:06:06]:
But they trade anywhere in cents. So if it’s a 50, 50 shot at any given time then then your contract is trading for 50 cents. But what’s interesting about it is that as the odds change and right now the odds are dependent. Now this is the other thing that’s interesting. All three of the betting markets are different. They do all show Trump is leading in the betting markets but to varying degrees. Which is interesting as well that you would think the quote crowd wisdom would essentially have them all similar and they’re not. You can close out your quote bad or essentially traded before the event happens.

Wes Moss [00:06:46]:
So if you place a bet, it’s a 50% probability, you’re buying at $0.50 and now it’s at a 60% probability. You can then technically you should be able to sell that contract just like a watching a stock chart. So again the world has seen in a huge and massive influx when it comes to wagers. And of course sports wagers have blown up. It’s a massive industry now. And now you’ve got all these other, there’s all these sites worldwide that you can bet on anywhere from the election to the highest grossing movie to who wins the Champions League in soccer, football.

Jeff Lloyd [00:07:23]:
Now I’ve seen some bets coming in or wagers coming in that it wasn’t just like 10 or $20, it was like, I think it was like tens of millions of dollars being placed just on the presidential election alone by just one user. Yeah. And I’m wondering, you know, does that have an effect on what, what the odds, you know, increase or decrease for one candidate or the other with that, with that amount of money coming in on one candidate alone, you know, no.

Wes Moss [00:07:49]:
Question, it’s got to. And what’s also interesting when you hear this is what, two or three weeks ago, that supposedly there’s some big bets that were made for the presidential election. The reason you can so quickly know who that is is that because this is traded in cryptocurrency, there is this ledger that people can look at and see. Now of course people don’t necessarily put their real names, but they are, it’s somewhat traceable and quote, open and transparent. But of course one or two giant bets could sway this. So I think these all are just, they’re indications and you certainly can’t take these as gospel. Same thing with the historical indicators. So Jeff Floyd we’ve been looking at the first one, of course is the S&P 500 performance.

Wes Moss [00:08:34]:
July 31, October 31, three months prior to the November election. And essentially, as you can imagine, markets up, incumbent wins, market down, incumbent loses. And that’s had a strong track record. It’s been correct every year since 1984.

Jeff Lloyd [00:08:48]:
Yeah, it’s predicted the last 10 elections that are. That predictor came true 10 out of 10 the last 10 times.

Wes Moss [00:08:55]:
But it’s been wrong four times out of 24. So that’s called an 83% rate of being correct or not. And where do we stand today? If you go back to July 31st until October 31st, which is what, Thursday of this past week, S&P 500 up about three and call it three and a half percent or so. So just decidedly positive. And I don’t, so I don’t know if it matters how much it’s positive. It’s just whether it’s up or down. And some of them have been just a fraction of a percent that have and they’ve still been correct. So I don’t know if it matters if it’s up, the market’s up 2% or up 10%.

Wes Moss [00:09:33]:
I think that the indicator itself is just if we’re trying to be true to what’s happened historically, what we’ve watched is either up a little bit or down a little bit. And that’s what has pointed towards which, which party wins or not. And what we’ve seen now is that is positive, that points to the incumbent. The other thing of course is the misery index, which makes sense, which is the combination of the unemployment rate plus the inflation rate. It’s technically a three month moving average. So it’s not, you don’t just exactly Add the two numbers together. But that’s also decidedly below where it was a year ago. And as you can imagine, if the misery rate’s higher, so a year ago it was about 7.2.

Wes Moss [00:10:13]:
If it, let’s say it climbs to 8 or 9, that means people are more squeezed and quote, more miserable and that leads to the incumbent party losing. As you can imagine, if the misery rate has been lower historically, that is a very strong track record of saying the incumbent party gets to stick around. The track record of the misery index is a 94% track record. So it is predicted accurately 15 out of the last 16 elections. So again, pretty strong signs.

Jeff Lloyd [00:10:46]:
Yeah.

Wes Moss [00:10:46]:
So the historical indicators point to the incumbent. The betting markets and the polls are pointing to the non incumbent. So this is a big test, right this next week we’ll know what to look at. Do we throw all these historical indicators away because the betting markets are right and the polls are right? We don’t know. Well, I think we’ll learn a lot over the next week. Hopefully we’ll know quickly, but we don’t know about that either. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a poly market bet on how many days it took to call the election.

Jeff Lloyd [00:11:18]:
I do want to go back to the misery index just a little bit and just talk about that inflation component and think about how much Americans have been affected by inflation in their everyday lives over the past year, over the last two years, three years. I think that’s an important component heading into the election as everyday US Consumers have been feeling that effect for quite some time.

Wes Moss [00:11:44]:
And I think that if we were fast forward to next weekend, what are we going to be looking at? It’s hard for me to not think the number one variable in the soup will because we know historically it’s the economy. We know historically that’s almost always the number one, two and three item on everyone’s mind, voting in America. A huge part of that, though, in this current cycle is inflation. So I think we’ll look back next week and say, wow, look at the role inflation played in this election. The other thing you can place a wager on, on these marketplaces is the balance of power. Who’s in the Senate, who’s in the House. And that leads us to, I think kind of the core theme we’ve had over the past year in looking at elections is that, and that’s the configuration and elections matter. Yes, they do.

Wes Moss [00:12:41]:
And certainly politics influences different sectors and industries, but collectively the market figures out a way to move forward in almost any political really in any political configuration. Yeah.

Jeff Lloyd [00:12:55]:
I think it’s just a reminder as we head into election season, or I guess we’ve been in election season at least here in Georgia for four months with all those ads. One thing I’m pretty excited about, not seeing as many TV ads moving forward. But I think it’s just a good reminder that regardless of the balance of power in Washington, historically speaking, the s and P500, the US stock market has performed well and it doesn’t matter who’s in control of Congress, like who’s got the control of the Senate, who’s in control of the House, who’s in control of the White House. It doesn’t matter. Historically, the market has performed well under any balance of power.

Wes Moss [00:13:37]:
It really in similar ways. Republican Senate, Democratic House, Republican President 13.7 Republican Congress, Democratic President 13 Democratic Senate, Republican House, Democratic President 15.7. These are long term historical averages and it’s just a good reminder. Here we are. And I think the energy that’s around any election builds and builds until it takes a while to figure out who really won. The energy continues to build. So the emotions are going to be high. I heard this past week that something like 70% of Americans are nervous, depressed, anxious just because we’re headed into election.

Wes Moss [00:14:13]:
So there’s a lot of emotion that goes into this. I think just for investors sake, it’s important to remember that if we’re looking objectively, we can calm our emotions because our 401 accounts have done pretty darn well in equity markets. Regardless of the balance of power, the political configuration in Washington. Jeff Floyd, we’ll leave it on that hopefully more calming note. We’ve got more Money Matters straight ahead. If you’ve ever done a Jane Fonda workout or if you remember as a kid Rocky running the steps and if Michael keaton is still Mr. Mom to you, then guess what, it’s officially time to do some retirement planning. It’s Wes Moss from Money Matters.

Wes Moss [00:15:01]:
Weren’t those the good old days? Well, with a little bit of retirement planning there are plenty of good days ahead. Schedule an appointment with our team today@yourwealth.com that’s why you are your wealth.com. jeff Lloyd, we were looking at post election historical results. You know what, we’re going to get to this in just a second. But this was an announcement, I think just this. It was late this past week the treasury came out and announced the brand new I bond rates, inflation bonds, series I bonds that now remember when these got to over 9%.

Jeff Lloyd [00:15:40]:
Do you remember how many calls and emails we got two years ago about.

Wes Moss [00:15:44]:
I bonds that October, it was the May 2022 through October 2022 series that ended up paying 9.62%. Now that’s because inflation was so high. Remember I bonds are essentially some sort of fixed rate which changes plus what they credit you for six months worth of inflation and it resets every six months. It’s putting money into a savings type account. Again government backed that has either a small coupon, in some cases no coupon, but usually there’s a little bit of a coupon plus whatever happens with inflation. And right now the new ibonds and this is from the November date through April of 2025 will pay 3.1% in interest. That’s the combination of the fixed portion which is about 1.2 and the variable portion is 1.9. Yeah, put it together, it’s 3.1.

Jeff Lloyd [00:16:43]:
And that rate changes every six months. So it can go up or it could go down, which it’s done. In this case it’s been going down.

Wes Moss [00:16:52]:
Sorry. It’s 3.11% in interest.

Jeff Lloyd [00:16:54]:
Oh, you said 3.1, didn’t you? It’s 3.11.

Wes Moss [00:16:59]:
So the only catch, which again I like I bonds, I think it’s there. Again, if you’re going to buy Treasuries, certainly you should be thinking about I bonds as an option. The only real issue is that there’s a max and you can only do $10,000 worth of them. Now if you, you can go up to another 5,000 in paper I bonds if you’re using your federal tax refund and opt to use 5,000 of it towards an additional 5 and I bonds. But think of it as if you’re trying to do this $10,000 in electric I bonds per year through Treasury Direct. So that’s, I would say that’s a limiting factor, of course. Let’s talk return. So we’re going to also get to.

Wes Moss [00:17:42]:
Now we’re going to do post election historical results and then Jeff Lloyd, you pulled a really interesting way to look at six month periods. You we always think about sell in May and go away six months of the year, not so good. The other six months are great. This chart that you found shows every six month period, kind of like a heat map, what the best six month period is, what the worst six month period is. We’re going to get to that in just a second. But so we just talked about how political configurations should not matter to market returns over time because companies figure Out a way in whatever political climate they’re in, how do we continue to grow the business, grow revenue, grow margins, increase earnings, increase sales, you name it. That’s the army of America. Productivity at work.

Wes Moss [00:18:33]:
And to some extent it cuts through policy, cuts through politics. Now, yes, you can certainly argue there’s certain sectors that have a little more heavily influenced by regulation and government spending. But in aggregate markets, find a way. Here are the post election historical results and I’m not going to go through every number. We went back to 1972 and looked at what markets did. This is the s and P500 three months, six months and 12 months later on average all the way since 1972. A year out, 12 months out on average markets were up 13%. Six months later, markets are up 6.

Wes Moss [00:19:12]:
And three months later, markets were up about 3. You’ve essentially gotten about a percent per month on average once the election is over. So these all started on election day. It was November 6th and November 1st, November 3rd, going back in time and we’re measuring one year out. And the results to some extent speak for themselves. On average up about 1% a month, which again is not all that different than historical averages in any given month. Now what about this heat map that you bring to the table? You trying to throw us off? Look at long term market trends?

Jeff Lloyd [00:19:54]:
No, I just want to bring some good news to Money Matters listeners as we enter November. And historically speaking, the next six months have been the best time for the stock market. Talking about November through April. So if you, if you go through all these six month periods, November through April has been up on average 7.1% and it’s been higher 77% of the time. Now if you look at, go to the worst, and I think our listeners have heard us say, well, do you sell in May and go away? Because this chart would tell you historically speaking, it’s the worst performing time for the stock market, up only 1.7% and it’s up only 65% of the time.

Wes Moss [00:20:44]:
And that’s for the entire six month period. That’s pretty paltry.

Jeff Lloyd [00:20:48]:
And this is data going back to 1950. So I mean this is a good section of data that we’re looking at. So almost 75 years worth of data.

Wes Moss [00:20:56]:
But what if we had listened to this and we, and what if an investor had sold in May and went away?

Jeff Lloyd [00:21:03]:
So if you sold out at the end of April, got completely out of the market and tried to buy back in this week after that timeframe was up, you would have missed out on a 15 to 16% gain in the S&P 500 over that timeframe.

Wes Moss [00:21:19]:
I wonder how much that’s going to skew these numbers. Probably not all that much. Again, when you go back historically, 1950, that’s a long time, right? We’re looking at 75 some years. This one year isn’t going to make a huge difference if you look at this chart. But the good news is the bad, the worst period of time historically was just pretty good. And if you sold out, you missed out. The good news is you’re coming back here November through April. It looks like the best period of time, 77% as you said, Jeff Lloyd, higher that six month period, more than three quarters of the time.

Wes Moss [00:21:57]:
And on average, investors have gotten about 7.1% in the S&P 500 during that six month period. Makes sense.

Jeff Lloyd [00:22:04]:
I think it goes back to one of those core principles we talk about here. Time in the market is more important than timing the market.

Wes Moss [00:22:12]:
The other thing that I, and the reason is that we see this at work around us every day without really being able to see it working around us every day. And the whole reason you go back and you look over the course of history, the longer you look at a period of time, the closer we get to the long term historical average, which is, call it 10, 11% for the S&P 500. But what is at work is this constant sense of improvement, progress, innovation that hundreds and hundreds of companies and thousands and thousands of employees are working towards. And that’s this army of American productivity that it’s just so hard to see until all of a sudden something pops up and it looks like it’s a miracle. Wait, where did that come from? And really it’s been worked on for quite some time. Remember 15 years ago, Jeff Lloyd, how we thought of, remember stem cells?

Jeff Lloyd [00:23:17]:
That was a big, that was a.

Wes Moss [00:23:19]:
Big political discussion for a little while. Stem cells are going to change the world. They’re going to change the world. And then I don’t know, once in a while you hear somebody say, oh, they injected some stem cells. My knee hurt. They did some stem cells. I don’t know if it really worked. So it’s kind of like, okay, yeah, stem cells.

Wes Moss [00:23:37]:
It sounded good. Well, that’s a stem cell. It could just turn into anything you want and fix. And then people stop talking about it. Again. Last thing I heard about stem cells was, yeah, yeah, I got some in my lower back, didn’t. I don’t know if it worked or not. Now, again, I’m probably oversimplifying here.

Wes Moss [00:23:55]:
If somebody in the industry that works in stem cells probably saying, wes, that’s wrong. Well, I am wrong because the Wall Street Journal had just an eye popping article this week that not only reminded me of what used to be the promise of stem cells to hey, this is really happening. It just took a little while and this is just incredible innovation, but there’s this, it caught my eye. And this was the image for the Wall Street Journal article was a heart. It was a heart. It was made out of tiny little Legos, but it looked beautifully like the organ. Not just a Valentine’s Day heart, but the heart. Most of it was red, but there was a part that was yellow.

Wes Moss [00:24:46]:
Wait a minute, what’s the yellow part? It’s the part that dies when you have a heart attack. Evidently you lose a billion heart cells when you have a heart attack. Now, fortunately, I think you’ve got 4 or 5 billion. I don’t know the exact number, but there’s a lot of damage done in a heart attack. Makes sense. And that was the yellow part of the Legos in this heart. So it caught my eye and I start reading it and it is just this. What is now happening when it comes to this, essentially regrowing and regenerating organs, particularly the heart.

Wes Moss [00:25:22]:
Kind of a big deal. It’s actually happening right now. There are researchers all over the world. This is Dr. Chuck Murray from the USA, University of Southern California, almost said South Carolina. You’ve got doctors working at King’s College from London, Peter Schultz at the Scripps Research Institute in California. And they’re making organ regeneration a reality. It’s working now.

Wes Moss [00:25:50]:
Right now. They’re still doing this in primates. It’s macaque monkeys, I believe that’s how you pronounce it. But it’s called regenerative, regenerative medicine that could, if this works in humans and human trials on some of these are set to begin in 2026. That’s not far away where they’re essentially taking, I guess, I think they called it a hydrogel of some version of stem cells. And in some cases here they’re using. It’s not mRNA, but it’s Microrna. That I believe is supposed to tell the MRNA rna, which is the messenger rna, what kind of cells to grow.

Wes Moss [00:26:31]:
So they inject this and they’ve done this again in primates and it’s working to regrow heart tissue. There are scientists I believe from Germany that are doing the same thing and regrowing lung tissue. So if you have pulmonary fibrosis, which I have a distant family member that has this. You essentially get all the scar tissue in your lungs. They’ve shown that they can regrow healthy lung tissue. So it’s really promising results. And so the stem cell thing, that kind of. I hadn’t heard a whole lot about it.

Wes Moss [00:27:08]:
It is a year from now we could be hearing some pretty incredible things. Think about longevity, think about life expectancy. Just think of what that could do for the world. And it’s a great example of the army of American productivity. It’s been working. It’s been working every second of every day since we heard about it. And now all of a sudden, oh, this is what it can do. Pretty miraculous.

Jeff Lloyd [00:27:30]:
That was a fascinating article.

Wes Moss [00:27:32]:
Yeah, it’s kind of regrowing hearts of.

Jeff Lloyd [00:27:35]:
The heart that just seems, that seems like science fiction. Yet it could be a reality in 2026 in humans.

Wes Moss [00:27:42]:
What’s the most important piece of information today?

Jeff Lloyd [00:27:45]:
Look, we’ve talked a lot about some like pre election indicators, whether it’s the misery index or what the s and P500 does three months leading into the election. I think it’s important for us to just maybe look back at what, what happens to the market 3, 6, 12 months after the election. Let’s look at some post election results for the stock market.

Wes Moss [00:28:09]:
Yeah. And what are they?

Jeff Lloyd [00:28:10]:
And going back to 1972, so we got 13 election cycles that we’re talking through. Three months later, on average the market’s up about three and a quarter percent. Six months later, about 6%. And then 12 months later up just about 13%.

Wes Moss [00:28:28]:
So call it about a percent a month after we go to the polls, after the polls close. And I think it’s a good reminder and I do think that’s probably the most important point of today is that we get pretty worried and ginned up right around this time. It’s totally natural. I think it’s probably as much as it’s ever been. We’ve been hearing reports about high levels of anxiety just because of the election. I think the interview I heard, they interviewed someone that said, I wake up every morning with a pit in my stomach knowing the election’s right around the corner. People are worried, people are scared about it. Our audience is worried about retirement, early retirement, financial security.

Wes Moss [00:29:09]:
And if we’re, what we’re trying to do now is just bring back, bring that back into perspective, that yes, we’re going to have some anxiety around this, but historically the markets do actually quite well once the election is behind us. One element of that is certainty. As in we know and it’s not the boogeyman that usually is hitting markets. It’s the boogeyman we still haven’t quite seen. We hear him in the closet and it’s like what is it going to. What’s going to actually happen? Then we get a result and then you have certainty and then the market adjusts. Okay, it’s the incumbent one or it’s the non incumbent one. We get used to that very quickly.

Wes Moss [00:29:49]:
We just want certainty and I think that’s part of the reason why we see markets do pretty well a year post an election with that Jeff Lloyd thank you for being here on a Sunday morning.

Jeff Lloyd [00:30:00]:
Thank you for having me back on this 25 hour day.

Wes Moss [00:30:04]:
20. Is that what it is? That’s about right? Again, you can find me and Jeff Lloyd, it’s easy to do so at your wealth. That’s why you are your wealth.com have a wonderful rest of your day.

Mallory Boggs [00:30:22]:
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