Which Elections Should Investors Focus On in 2026?

Transcript

Ken Fisher:

Most people don't really think about what elections go on outside of their country, and maybe, if they're not American, they think about what does go on in American elections. Everybody knows the American political cycle. Everybody knows that 2026 is a US midterm election cycle. That's not shocking. And of course, that's the big election of 2026, by any standard. Interestingly, in 2026, there are not many other really important elections to global investing. There are a lot of elections, but they're almost all—I'll come back and fill in the exceptions—but they're almost all either countries of some significance—with regional elections, like municipalities or parts of their legislature— or tertiary countries.

I mean, there's a lot of countries in the world in 2026, they're having elections whose names you'll hardly recognize because you don't think about them. They're smaller, less significant countries. They're not the countries that you normally hear about, and they will not impact the markets much. There's elections in Brazil, one of the bigger markets. But the two most important—I mean, you know, for example, in 2026, the Russian elections. But you know that Russian elections aren't really elections. Places like France and Germany, important countries, regional elections. The big elections that could matter more importantly are in the back of the year, October-ish, in a similar time frame to the US midterm elections, in Israel and in Taiwan. And both of those are of import because of their geopolitical potential impact and how that might impact stocks. India is an important country, but it's got a series of regional elections over the year, and no one of them is likely to be earth-shattering, although India is an important country, and it's always important to pay attention to India. Again, a lot of people in the developed world pay less attention to India than they should. But if—and again, AI does just a marvelous job of this kind of stuff— if you just take a device like this and use Google or whatever you like and say, "What are the countries with elections in 2026?" It'll just rattle them all off for you. And some of them are done, you know, rattled off, you know, done by region.

Like here's the ones in Africa, here's the ones in Europe, here's the ones in Asia, and some of them are just done alphabetically. But it'll take you through all of them, and you don't really need me to figure out what are the important countries, what aren't, what's regional, what's national, because they're all listed there. And again, I encourage you to think globally because whatever country you're in, the United States or otherwise, not perfectly so, but mostly, tends to be hugely more impacted by what goes on with global outcomes than it does from what goes on inside the country itself. So, if you, for example, are American—greatest country in the world— it is also true that the US market almost always goes the way the non-US market goes, unless both the US and the non-US market are hovering around close to zero and one goes one way and one goes the other and the difference is insignificant.

But otherwise, if the world goes one way, so is the US. If the US is going one way, so is the world. And yet, the difference between which will do better, like 2023 - 2024, with US doing better than the non-US, and in 2025, with the non-US doing much better than the US. Those differences are important. And so, thinking about these kinds of elections and the regions is something that's worth you putting a little time into. And I thank you for the question.

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