As our readers may recall, we had expressed ourselves confident to be able to predict the outcome of the 2020 US presidential election with a high degree of confidence based on financial market behavior. As our readers will also be aware, we have good reason to be confident to be able to “read” market behavior for the purpose of making profitable predictions of subsequent such behavior.1
This time around, no matter how many different data points and series we analyzed, both in their complex interplay as well as in isolation, the resulting forecast was “maximal uncertainty”. During the first part of the trading day of November 3, which, to be sure, ended before the polls closed, everything pointed to a win by the Republican presidential candidate. During the latter half, this advantage was completely equalized. Just as in 2016 we were one hundred percent certain of the eventual outcome that quickly became a commonly accepted certainty already during election night, this time the overwhelming impression of maximal uncertainty kept us from writing anything here as we thought saying that we had no clue might sound as if we were simply ducking out.
Yet the maximally uncertain outcome of the election that will by all likelihood be eventually decided in a series of fiercely fought court battles between the two campaigns over apparently at least to some extent substantiated claims of voting irregularities (on the face of it, to name one example we have read about, it would indeed seem close to a statistical impossibility that a batch of more than 23,000 at-once reported votes would contain only votes for one of the two candidates and not a single vote for the other) has opened my eyes to the notion that uncertainty can be a predictable outcome, too. Uncertainty of future happenings is what enables what we perceive as our free will. So the outcome, as it currently stands, conceptually reminds us of the part of our existence that is characterized by individual freedom, by individuality itself. Which, in turn, is a defining element of what makes humans human.
A highly human election outcome, thus.
_____- A prominent example being our “corona crash bottom call” of March 24, 2020: https://loico.com/why-we-have-likely-seen-the-bottom-of-the-corona-crash-in-the-us-stock-market/[↩]