Wolfram Computation Meets Knowledge

Date Archive: 2008 October

Best of Blog

Stock Market Returns by Presidential Party

The New York Times recently published an “Op-Chart” by Tommy McCall on its Opinion page showing what your returns would have been had you started with $10,000 in 1929 and invested it in the stock market, but only during the administrations of either Democratic or Republican presidents. His calculations showed that if you had invested only during Republican administrations you would now have $11,733 while if you had invested only during Democratic administrations you would now have $300,671. Twenty-five times as much!

That’s a pretty dramatic difference, but does it stand up to a closer look? Is it even mathematically plausible that you could have essentially no return on your investment at all over nearly 80 years, just by choosing to invest only during Republican administrations?

To answer these questions, I of course turned to Mathematica.

And the answer is that yes, it is mathematically plausible, using the assumptions made by McCall. My analysis using historical Dow Jones Industrial Average data available in Mathematica’s FinancialData function roughly matches the figures in the Times, which used Standard & Poor’s data. (I used the Dow because it’s more convenient, not because I think it’s a better measure.)

But the fact that they are correct doesn’t mean the figures are even remotely meaningful. Here are some problems with the New York Times’ Op-Chart:
Announcements & Events

Russell Towle: 1949–2008

A few times a year they would arrive. Email dispatches from an adventurous explorer in the world of geometry. Sometimes with subject lines like “Phenomenal discoveries!!!” Usually with images attached. And stories of how Russell Towle had just used Mathematica to discover yet another strange and wonderful geometrical object.

Then, this August, another email arrived, this time from Russell Towle’s son: “... last night, my father died in a car accident”.

I first heard from Russell Towle thirteen years ago, when he wrote to me suggesting that Mathematica’s graphics language be extended to have primitives not just for polygons and cubes, but also for “polar zonohedra”.

I do not now recall, but I strongly suspect that at that time I had never heard of zonohedra. But Russell Towle’s letter included some intriguing pictures, and we wrote back encouragingly.

There soon emerged more information. That Russell Towle lived in a hexagonal house of his own design, in a remote part of the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. That he was a fan of Archimedes, and had learned Greek to be able to understand his work better. And that he was not only an independent mathematician, but also a musician and an accomplished local historian.