The S&P 500 Is Up 27.6% Under Trump's Second Term. It Was Up 32.4% at This Point Under Obama.

27.6 percent. That is how much the S&P 500 has gained between President Trump's second inauguration and Friday's close, roughly 20 months in, according to [Axios](https://alto.gab.com/feed/axios/item/423195). It sounds like a strong number until it sits next to the three comparisons that matter: 28.5 percent at the same point in Trump's first term, 32.4 percent under Obama, and 2.7 percent under Biden.

The three numbers side by side

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 18.8 percent since Trump's second inauguration, compared with 33.8 percent under Trump 1.0, 28.1 percent under Obama, and 0.3 percent under Biden, according to figures reported by [Axios](https://alto.gab.com/feed/axios/item/423195) and independently confirmed by [Yahoo Finance](https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/p-500-27-6-under-134359420.html). The Nasdaq has climbed 35.1 percent this term, versus 43.5 percent under Trump 1.0, 51.4 percent under Obama, and a 12.6 percent decline under Biden. The Russell 3000, a broader measure than the S&P 500, is the one index where Trump 2.0 has edged ahead of Trump 1.0.

Why the gap is closing, not widening

The one-year comparison told a worse story for this administration. At the 12-month mark, the S&P 500 was up just 15.7 percent under Trump 2.0, versus 24.1 percent under his own first term, 19.3 percent under Biden, and 35.3 percent under Obama. Eight months later, the second-term market has added roughly 12 additional percentage points of gain, closing most of the distance to Trump 1.0 and pulling further ahead of Biden.

The mechanism behind that recovery is not mysterious. The market fell nearly 20 percent by early April 2025 as investors priced in the administration's proposed tariffs. It rebounded once corporate earnings came in far stronger than feared: second-quarter S&P 500 earnings rose more than 53 percent from a year earlier, more than double what analysts had initially forecast, according to [Yahoo Finance](https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/p-500-27-6-under-134359420.html).

The Fed seat that changed hands in the middle of this

One structural change sits inside this window that did not happen during the comparable stretch of any other presidency measured here. Kevin Warsh was sworn in as Federal Reserve chairman in May 2026, succeeding Jerome Powell. A market recovering from a tariff-driven selloff and adjusting to a new Fed chair in the same twenty months is not the same setup as Obama's climb out of a financial crisis trough or Trump 1.0's tax-cut-fueled run, even when the headline percentages land close together.

None of the four comparisons run on identical starting conditions, which is the caveat every version of this chart needs and rarely gets. Obama took office during the depths of a financial crisis, when stocks had nowhere to go but up from a badly beaten baseline. Trump 1.0 began with an economy already in its eighth year of expansion. Biden inherited a market recovering from the pandemic crash and then absorbed the fastest rate-hiking cycle in four decades. Trump 2.0 began from a market near record highs and then self-inflicted a tariff shock in its first hundred days.

Who this actually matters to

A 401k invested in an S&P 500 index fund on Trump's second inauguration day is worth 27.6 percent more today than it was then, before accounting for any contributions made in between. That is the number that shows up in a retirement statement. Whether it should be read as strong, weak, or middling depends entirely on which of the three comparison points a reader picks, and each of the three tells a defensibly different story.