Mr. Trump Goes To Washington

The US election has yielded a result that’s surprised everyone. Republican Donald Trump, which was behind in many polls, managed to gather 265 of 538 electoral votes as at 3:00pm local time. He is on the way to winning 270 electoral votes as he is leading in 4 out the 6 remaining states that have yet to complete their vote counting. Democrat Hillary Clinton has only managed to secure 218 electoral and is unlikely to close the gap.

The unexpected loss can be attributable to many factors, which political analysts will study for the many years to come. For now, pollster Sam Wang, which assigned a probability of 99% to a Clinton win, explained where his forecast went wrong. To wit:

Using the projections of the NY Times, Donald Trump is outperforming his pre-election polling margins by a median of 4.0 +/- 2.6 percentage points (the 8 states in the Geek’s Guide). In Senate races, Republicans are outperforming by 6.0 +/- 3.7 percentage points. A five-percentage-point polling miss would be a tremendous error by modern polling standards.

Trump victory will see one of the most inexperienced candidates to ever win the US Presidency. His unsteady leadership skill, poor temperament and lack of knowledge in many fields would pose serious geopolitical and economic risks to America and the rest of the world. I believe that we will see a prolonged period where risk-off trades will dominate. That means stock markets will likely to trend downward for sometimes.