Midterm elections have historically been a no-lose scenario for stocks. Dating back to the 1950s, the S&P 500 has always been higher a year after the midterms, no matter the outcome. According to Capital Ideas, stocks in the year following midterms have performed twice as well as other years.
The bottom line: Markets may shrug if there is a Democratic sweep, because the next Congress is "very unlikely to undo the major market-impactful legislation that has already been passed under President Trump," like tax cuts, strategists at UBS point out.
Men between the ages of 25-34 are participating in the job market — that is, working or looking for a job — at lower rates than they were prior to the 2008 financial crisis (86.8% then vs. 86.1% now), according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, despite recent wage growth and lower unemployment.
The bottom line: 500,000 more men would currently be working or looking for employment if their participation was at pre-2008 levels, Bloomberg reports.
Companies have been using a secret scoring system to determine what kind of benefits and treatment a customer receives, based on the potential financial value of that customer, the Wall Street Journal reports.
"There's no free lunch. The more profitable you are, the better service you will get."
— Sunil Gupta, a marketing professor at Harvard Business School, to the Journal
The details: The customer lifetime value, or CLV, isn't available to the public. But it could determine how long you're kept on hold over the phone or if you get a seat upgrade after calling an airline. According to the Journal, these scores are calculated by taking into account how much money a customer spends, the number of returns that customer makes, and their ZIP code, among other factors. People who are frequent online shoppers, have a cellphone, or have a bank account have "at least one CLV score, more likely several."
