With this being our 300th edition, the case was put forward at The Weekly's HQ that we should nonchalantly raise our bat, salute the (adoring) crowd and then duly give ourselves a well-deserved weekend off. Sadly, that proposition fell on deaf ears in the editor’s office, and here we are, ten days before Christmas and only seventeen days until 2020, wondering what on earth to write about. It’s not like we’ve had a General Election result to digest, the final round of Champions League qualifiers to watch, retail investor redemption requests to monitor or Christmas parties to attend. However, rather than regurgitate some of the content from the world’s news mediums, we’ve decided, with this being the last ‘proper’ edition of The Weekly of the year, to revisit our annual predictions for 2019. And the truth is, we could have fared better. Much better, in fact. Whilst there may still be a couple of weeks to go, we are confident that we will have got just over half our predictions right by the time Big Ben strikes midnight to welcome in a new decade.
We were certainly not aided by our sports predictions. A pretty miserable four out of ten here, thankfully boosted by two correct answers on a single day back in July, with England's unforgettable Cricket World Cup victory and Novak Djokovic's epic victory over Roger Federer at Wimbledon. With that sort of track record, asking us to predict who will the BBC Sports Personality of the Year tonight seems pretty pointless. Ben Stokes is the over-whelming bookies favourite to take the prize after a summer of cricketing heroics. It’s hard to argue with that.
With our political predictions, we again scored pretty poorly. We correctly predicted that Mrs May (remember her?) would not be Prime Minister on 31st December, but then again, we did predict that Brexit would have taken place by March, that there wouldn’t be a General Election in 2019 and that Michael Gove would be the next Prime Minister. Whoops! Still, there wouldn’t have been too many who, at the start of the year, would have predicted the Conservatives winning a large majority, including seats in constituencies like Blyth Valley for the first time ever.
As for the economy, a distinctly average predicting performance. It now seems improbable that UK GDP growth will exceed the Bank of England’s forecast of 1.20%. On Tuesday, the ONS announced that the UK economy had stagnated in October, and also over the last quarter. On an annual basis, the economy only grew by 0.7% over the last year, the weakest since March 2012. However, the base rate will be 0.75%, and UK 10 Year Government Bond Yields will be below 1.30% at the end of 2019….0.89% on Friday. Despite the large Conservative majority, the FTSE is still unlikely to surpass 7,500, settling at 7,353 on Friday, having jumped 1.1% in a day. The pound surged by more 2% too, settling at 1.20 against the euro and 1.33 against the dollar. With our predictions of ending at 1.20 and 1.35, this is one prediction that will go down to the wire.
Property. The ‘bread and butter’. The Weekly’s so-called specialist subject. The opportunity to make amends. A couple of misjudgements though. Commercial property investment volumes won’t reach £50bn and property won’t deliver a 3.5% return in 2019. However, aside from these two, a pretty pleasing, and much needed, performance. There has been limited yield compression across the main sectors, the UK remains an attractive investment destination, there was steady rental growth in the UK’s key regional office markets, retail woes continued, and...there has been significant institutional investment into the Build-to-Rent sector. These all helped towards a highly admirable score of eight out of ten.
Quite rightly, attention swiftly turns to 2020 and the future. A new dawn. A new decade. Will there be a post-election bounce for the property industry? More deals, less fence-sitting? Share prices in UK housebuilders, REITs and agency firms all soared on Friday post the result. A sign of the future? Hopefully. But sadly the B-word remains key. The election may be settled, but there are still some huge political questions that are not. Bull and Bear will be back in January with their more detailed review of 2019 and having a stab at predicting what lies ahead.