Election Countdown Calculator (“ECC”), is Orion’s tool aimed to provide insight into which party will win The White House come November 5th. The math behind the ECC is simple. Since 1928, the performance of the S&P 500 Index (S&P 500) for the three months before the Presidential election successfully “predicted” the winner of The White House 83% of the time. 

More specifically, when the S&P 500 is positive for those three months the incumbent party tends to hold onto the White House and when the S&P 500 is down for those three months the party out of power tends to capture the White House. While we don’t know for sure if the performance of the S&P 500 and the outcome of the vote speaks to causation, correlation, or neither, the ECC is as good a tool as any to bring some predictability to an unpredictable campaign season. 

The ECC will be updated and incorporated into Orion’s 2024 Election site between now and Election Day.

Source: FactSet.  The S&P 500 Index is an unmanaged composite of 500-large capitalization companies. This index is widely used by professional investors as a performance benchmark for large-cap stocks. An index is an unmanaged group of stocks considered to be representative of different segments of the stock market in general. You cannot invest directly in an index.