Financial markets, it’s often said, are forward looking. Of course they are! They’re an amalgamation of a wide variety of hopes and fears from people all around the world. It makes sense that they’re focused on future conditions.

Since there’s no incumbent running for president this year, there’s no real status quo candidate. In terms of tax and spending plans released so far, the closest candidates that we’d get to existing economic conditions are Hillary Clinton on the left and John Kasich on the right.

It’s no surprise both get boffo amounts of cash from Wall Street. So is Ted Cruz, although his proposed policies to cut taxes and government spending could lead to slightly more growth.

Although a few polls show Republican front-runner Donald Trump as a smart pick for a continued stock market rally, I’m a bit more skeptical. Yes, his calls to bring American manufacturing home would mean higher wages for U.S. workers. That’s a message that resonates well, particularly after 8 years of slow economic growth. It’s a solid argument that we need more jobs for people with manufacturing skills who have lost out in recent years as firms have gone offshore.

But what would that mean for corporations paying out higher wages? Right now, a company he calls out specifically on the stump, Apple (AAPL), sports profit margins of 22.8 percent. That’s pretty good for a tech company that makes a lot of physical, tangible items. A few software firms, who have no manufacturing to make, can sport far higher margins.

But let’s say Apple now has to make its products in the US. Sure, there’s the benefit of higher wages for some US workers. But Apple shareholders would likely see profit margins fall towards the long-term corporate average of 8-10 percent. Mr. Market doesn’t like seeing a company’s profit margins drop so much without the promise of a hot new product to make up for the decline.

So Trump, the billionaire real estate tycoon, might not be optimal for stocks. But compared to the other outsider in the race faring well, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, he’s in great shape.

That’s because Sanders has proposed a series of further government intrusions paid for in part by a tax on short-term trading. Taxing Wall Street in part to pay for these policies will make markets more illiquid and thus dangerous. His plans to increase government spending by over $15 trillion in a decade would mean a smaller private sector take from.

If he gets his entire grab-bag of goodies from free college to universal health care, estimates are that gross domestic product (GDP) would shrink by 9 percent. That’s if everything goes smoothly.

By comparison, during the housing and financial crisis in 2008, GDP only fell by about 4 percent from peak to trough! And that timeframe includes a lot of the fear and uncertainty that "Mr. Market" felt over the then-uncertainty of the rise of Senator Obama at the polls.

So keep an eye on the polls. Your future depends on it. We’ll see some more pullbacks in the coming months, and not all of it may look rational from a financial perspective. It will be the market pricing in political uncertainty.

Andrew Packer is a Senior Financial Editor with NewsMax Media. He currently writes the Insider Hotline investment advisory, serves as investment director for the Financial Braintrust, and is managing editor of Financial Intelligence Report. To read more of his work, GO HERE NOW.