Whatever your political leanings, there is an unmistakable public sentiment that change in that district is good...perhaps good enough that it could lend some temporary support to equities.

Each time is obviously different, but below is a table which shows how the S&P 500 behaved surrounding each of the prior public Presidential inaugurations since 1928.  The ones marked with an asterisk are the years sentiment may be impacted the most, as it was a change not only in President, but also in political party.  I've also included the outgoing President's approval rating just prior to the next one's inauguration.

The week leading up to the events weren't all that spectacular, showing a positive return not far out of line with any random week.  The day of the inaugurations, however, showed a distinct negative bias.  The day and week following were mixed to slightly positive, but nothing too far out of the norm.

When there was a change in political party, the returns were more positive (and more consistently so) in the week before and day and week after the change in leadership, but the day of the event was still negative most of the time.  I couldn't find much correlation between low-ranking presidents losing power and market performance going forward.

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