As we approach the festive season, and before we tuck into our mince pies, every year we treat our Armchair Trader Plus+ subscribers to some of our forecasts for the year ahead. This will be coming out on Thursday, but in advance of that I thought we'd take a look at last year's predictions, and how we got on.
A Year of Elections: Starmer and Trump win
A lot of countries went to the polls in 2024 and analysts - and markets - were heavily influenced by speculation on outcomes. It was easy to see that the US election was going to be one of the dominant political themes of the year. We started our forecast last year by saying that the Taiwanese election was being over-hyped and that it would not provoke an immediate Chinese invasion, as some members of the press were wildly speculating. This was based on observations on the ground in Taiwan during the campaign.
For the US, we did not anticipate the sudden decision by Joe Biden to step away from the Democratic nomination in July, but we did forecast a Trump win in November. As I wrote last December, "I can't see the Democrats stopping him."
As for the UK election, while the Conservative party's mandate could have allowed them to stay in power all the way through the year. we thought the UK general election would come earlier than that. We did not expect Sunak to call an election in July, but we did think it would happen in the second half of the year. We were right by four days as it turned out! We did not think the prime minister had enough support - or that the UK economy would improve sufficiently - for him to beat Sir Keir Starmer.
Read on to find out how we got on with our other predictions.
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