The 10 Best Stocks Since the Last Presidential Election (Apple is #6)

I've seen this list bouncing around the Web, so here they all are: The 10 best-performing stocks since the last presidential election, via Marketwatch.

It's tempting to pick off some low-hanging takeaways -- tech power! the rise of online everything! yuppie foods! -- but this list doesn't really tell us as much as some people would like it to. In a way, it's a glimpse into the story about how travel, luxury, houses, and cars hit the bottom in 2008 and had nowhere to go but up. When you pull back the lens to October 2007, the S&P 500 peak, you get a very different picture.

Here's the graph above, still in BLUE, with the 2007-2012 figures in RED:

Priceline and Apple are juggernauts. Just behind them, Whole Foods, Chipotle, and AutoNation doubled since the peak. Expedia, Ford, Lennar, and SanDisk have grown much less since 2007. They only look like the hottest stocks of the last four years because they fell so far the year before.