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I think this was a made-up attack line from cynics right when Trump ran, it's very obviously not true, very silly, and reflects badly on the people who believe it. It doesn't work like that, you can't just liquidate your whole net worth and invest in stocks and sit around earning money.
https://fortune.com/2015/08/20/donald-trump-index-funds/
Here's one estimate from 2015. They claim that Trump would have made money if he'd invested everything after 1988 -- yeah no, that's silly, he'd already turned his father's business into a major real-estate empire by then. You can't just play this game by picking any arbitrary year. Now that you've been massively, phenomonally, unbelievably successful, you're really a failure because the stock market beats you after this arbitrary date.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2021/10/11/its-official-trump-would-be-richer-if-he-had-just-invested-his-inheritance-into-the-sp500/
Here's one where Forbes concludes that Trump had beaten the market significantly, up until corona. Which means, at this point, we get to point and laugh at the failure of Donald Trump: haha, you lost valuation while you were president of the United States. You shluld have cashed it all in and bet on black Donald.
Since 2015 the market has 3x’d though, so you can likely push the 1988 date back significantly. In addition, Trump was in NYC real estate, which from the nadir in the 1970s has seen valuation growth far exceed equities. The fact remains that his business performance is pretty poor, everyone in NYC real estate made huge money because valuations have in many cases risen 40x or more since the trough.
Yes you can, especially in a relatively liquid market like NYC real estate. Investments are always judged against the broader market, what’s your point?
The market dived at the very end of 1987. Black Monday was 10/19/1987, and the market lost about 20% of its value on that day alone. Overall the S&P500 went from about 330 before Black Monday to about 230 in the weeks after. It took two years to get back to the previous peak.
I'm also guessing Trump took a hit from Black Monday, and that the Forbes estimate is both lagging and imprecise.
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Trump created some of the most valuable property in the world, and the construction of Trump Tower inspired a renaissance in New York City architecture at a time when the city was considered to be dying and gone. Were these broader trends that would have happened without Trump? Maybe, but he's a huge part of it. Judging the success of NY real estate independent of Trump is like saying Coke should have closed up shop and just bought Pepsi.
Trump is one of the richest men in the world. There are only something like 3,000 billionaires. If what he did wasn't all that impressive, there should be a lot more out there, an order of magnitude more. Why doesn't every guy with a reasonable fortune invest it all in the S&P 500, they're all underperforming the market.
This is silly. You can't just liquidate tens of millions of dollars and sit on your ass for forty years. You have to live on something, you have to do something, you don't just throw money at the market. It's a full time job, managing money, and then you end up doing deals and making investments anyways. "Instead of spending years lifting weights, you would have performed better if you'd spent that time working out instead." Now imagine saying that to Arnold.
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