Interesting observation: Uncertainty is a predictable outcome, too

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.

1. 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/[↩]