And so it proved. As the counts started to come in for key swing states at around 1am, it was clear that the Trump victory that markets and many in the media had largely discounted could indeed come to pass - and the disbelief in the BBC studio was palpable. The market reaction was actually rather more muted than I expected – gold rose, the Mexican peso fell, but the panicked responses were largely confined to a few hours of Wednesday morning trading – at least one lesson has been learned from the post-referendum mania that engulfed us.
I would suggest that we can learn other lessons from the apparent complacency of many election observers, whether pollsters, journalists or those in the markets. The first is that we should be careful not to insulate ourselves from the world around us with belief bubbles: in other words, just because we think something should happen that doesn’t mean it’s going to. Just because you want a company you’ve invested in to become the next big thing, it’s better to ask the hard questions as to why it might not be.
Another is that we should be careful paying attention to those who, for some reason, we believe have superior information to us. Did markets know more than we did when they rose in the run up to Brexit and the US election? Clearly not. 'Do your own research' is a mantra of private investing, and remains as pertinent today as ever. And more often than not, that research should confirm to you that the future can be an unpredictable beast, even if experts tell you otherwise.
That's why diversification is terribly important. Any investor worth their salt should have been happily able to hit the hay at a normal hour last night, knowing full well that their portfolio was built to weather whatever political storms could ravage it. Given there are plenty more populist tempests ahead in Europe, the time to buy the insurance diversification brings is now, before you might need it.
And finally, it’s worth thinking about what may happen if Trump genuinely believes his campaign rhetoric and introduces policies that restore balance to the relationship between American worker and global corporation. This could be viewed as a terrifying prospect for shareholders, whose cut of the spoils may be threated. But countering the prospect of damaging protectionism is a possible rebalancing of prosperity from the few to the many - and that could be the kicker to growth that the Western world has been long hunting for.
