The pollsters keep getting it wrong – and that matters for investors

Recent elections polls have been way off and that's making it harder to invest, says Matthew Lynn. Chances are, it's only going to get worse.

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If your guess is as good as his, how do you invest?

Anyone who follows politics, whether from the right or the left, will remember 10pm on the night of 5 May for quite some time. After being told for weeks to expect a hung parliament, and listening to days of speculation about who might form a deal with whom, the election exit poll suddenly painted a very different picture. As the first results came through, it turned out the Conservatives were cruising towards a surprisingly comfortable overall majority. The polls had been spectacularly misleading.

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Matthew Lynn

Matthew Lynn is a columnist for Bloomberg, and writes weekly commentary syndicated in papers such as the Daily Telegraph, Die Welt, the Sydney Morning Herald, the South China Morning Post and the Miami Herald. He is also an associate editor of Spectator Business, and a regular contributor to The Spectator. Before that, he worked for the business section of the Sunday Times for ten years. 

He has written books on finance and financial topics, including Bust: Greece, The Euro and The Sovereign Debt Crisis and The Long Depression: The Slump of 2008 to 2031. Matthew is also the author of the Death Force series of military thrillers and the founder of Lume Books, an independent publisher.