The prime minister has returned from her hurried trip to Strasbourg, clutching more paper. Will it be enough to get her deal through parliament and what does it mean for your money? John Stepek explains.
What are the chances? And what does it mean for your money?
What's changed?
The thing that worries Brexiteers is that the backstop could end up keeping Britain tied to the EU pretty much permanently.
Everyone involved in the talks keeps saying that it won't. But understandably, trust is in short supply, and interpretations seem to differ across the board. So no one is keen to take reassurances at face value.
So now May has come back from Strasbourg with some changes in wording to make it clear that a) the EU will not deliberately try to keep Britain in the backstop; b) that the UK and EU will try to work on technologies to replace the backstop requirement by the end of next year; and c) for Britain to have the option to launch a procedure to exit the backstop unilaterally if the EU doesn't act in good faith.
Will this do it? Well, we don't have long to wait to find out. We'll be getting a vote on it this afternoon.
There seems to be a view in the markets that it has a chance. But I have to say, May has a mountain to climb.
I'm no game theorist, but let's quickly try to analyse this in terms of incentives.
When it comes to the pro-Brexit faction (the DUP and the Tory leavers), the risk is that if they don't vote for this deal, then whatever we end up with will be a far "softer" Brexit or no Brexit at all.
Yet they might also think that if they knock this deal back, they might just keep the prospect of a "no deal" Brexit alive. And on that front, markets might be too complacent about the odds of simply reaching 29 March and falling out of the EU with no deal at all.
As far as Labour goes the party might be divided, but they're still opposition politicians they would rather force a general election one way or another (and the pro-Corbynites wouldn't mind a "no-deal" Brexit anyway, while The Independent Group are pro-second referendum), and voting against the deal is the easiest immediate way to push that goal along.
In other words, there's everything to play for, and if idealism and striking heroic poses trumps realism and compromise, this deal could easily get blown out of the water.
What'll happen if the deal doesn't get through?
But if it gets a big knock back again, I think we'll probably see a sell-off in the pound as investors start to worry that this genuinely is stalemate.
My gut feeling (which could be entirely wrong, I'm only even bringing it up because I've already said you shouldn't be making short-term bets on this) is that this won't pass, and that in fact, it probably won't even be that close.
Equally, however, I don't think we'll end up with a "no deal/clean" Brexit. The EU will talk tough on deadlines (that's what happens in negotiations, particularly as you get closer to the wire remember Greece), but if it's clear that parliament has its heart set on a softer Brexit or a permanent delay, then the wiggle room will be there.
In short, I still think that if this deal doesn't pass, we'll get something like it sooner or later, or no Brexit at all.
All of this matters from a political point of view. Whatever outcome we get will be unsatisfying for most voters. Some would argue that this is perhaps the point of democracy.
But from an investment point of view, the market doesn't care whether you're a dyed-in-the-wool Brexiteer or an advocate of Britain joining the euro all that really matters is what's in the price.
And from that perspective, one way or another, UK assets are still among the cheaper ones in the world. Indeed, I noticed this morning that at the end of January, the UK had nearly dipped into the top ten cheapest markets as judged by our favourite, the Cape ratio, according to StarCapital.
So I'm still happy with the idea that should you be looking to invest more money right now, putting some of that money in the UK, perhaps a bit more than you normally would, makes sense.
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John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.
He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.
His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.
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