5 Predictions
New Year's Day is the 'Monday' of the year.
There’s a new trend in tech called Prediction Markets. These are some combination of betting and crypto. Users purchase yes or no ‘shares’ - the more likely an outcome becomes, the more people buy the ‘yes’ share, and the price rises. Eventually, when the prediction is resolved, the shares either pay out or don’t.
There is no house like in a traditional bookmakers, and the odds are set by the market - not by the bookies.
These Prediction Markets are a wild west right now. They insist they aren’t gambling or gaming because of the financial structure - they are more like investing. But it’s hard to argue it’s anything but simply gambling.
And yet, overall, they seem to be the best predictors of the future: Polymarket, one Prediction Market, correctly predicted that Biden would drop out of the election and Trump would win - and correctly predicted results in just about every swing state.
Prediction often works that way - individuals odds of being correct are about as good as a coin flip. But the wisdom of the crowd seems to broadly get things right.
All this to say, share your own predictions in the comments and through the wisdom of the crowd maybe one or two will be correct.
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Last December, I made 9 predictions for 2025. Let’s see how I did, before jumping into 9 more predictions for 2026.
Trump and Elon Musk will have a falling out: ✅
Inflation will rise in the US, denting Trump’s popularity: ⌛
Inflation very marginally rose but Trump’s popularity plummeted. It was the tariffs, like I expected, but not inflation: it was the stock market crash.
Kemi will still be Tory leader: ✅
Labour will have a better year: ❌
You’ll hear a lot more about BRICS: ❌
TikTok will evade its ban: ✅
A new advance in AI will prevent the bubble from bursting: ✅
The bubble didn’t burst, thanks to a strong showing for Creative Generative AI. I lose some marks as I thought it’d be Agentic AI.
Germany will narrowly keep the AfD out of the Bundestag: ✅
The Eagles will win the Super Bowl: ✅
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I feel last year some of my predictions were a little vague, so I’ll try to be more specific this time.
Labour will have a better year - Starmer will remain PM.
At the end of 2024, people were angry with Labour. The free gear scandal, a series of bizarre speeches promising things would get worse. I confidently predicted that 2025 would be a better year.
What did we get in 2025? Constant missteps, a frontbench mired in various property scandals and u-turn after u-turn after u-turn.
But at the heart of it I think they are broadly making the right choices, and getting the right results. For whatever reason they’re just keeping it a secret.
The most frustrating example of their failure to communicate: after my local train service was nationalised I noticed an almost immediate improvement in performance. I figured it must just be a coincidence, the government hadn’t changed anything.
But I was wrong - it turns out within months of nationalisation: they’ve modernised the fleet and invested more than £600 million on infrastructure, materially reducing delays, especially at peak times. And yet they just didn’t tell anyone?
It’s the same story across the country. NHS waiting lists are falling and hospital standards are improving. Knife crime is falling for the first time in years. It is unequivocally easier to get a GP appointment. And Britain is finally building again
Brits will start to feel changes next year. On paper, the country is actually getting better. Labour needs to show their work a little more, and I think they will next year: saving Starmer from the threats of a coup.
Net immigration will fall… maybe too much
Immigration figures are a lagging indicator: they only show you the impact of work that happened months and years prior. A policy implemented today will not have any impact on the numbers until the medium/long-term future.
And now two plus years of interventions to get immigration falling are finally starting to take effect. In the first year of Labour, net migration has fallen by 2 thirds: plummeting down to pre-Brexit levels. (“This is driven by emigration!” you cry, but emigration does include people not born in Britain returning to their home country, which is increasing).
The pressure to implement new policies continues. Shabhana Mahmood, who has been very strong and impressive, continues to implement new policies to get the numbers down.
And, you can only imagine, the number will keep falling.
The problem? Our economy is built on a consistent flow of immigration. Our universities need the higher fees that international students bring and many industries rely on foreign workers. This is already starting with prisons: the urgent need for guards has led to the government laxing visa rules.
Without immigration to complain about, the far-right will have almost nothing to lean on. And so…
The far-right will falter globally, the fall of Trump begins
The UK tore itself out of Europe causing immigration to soar and the economy to slump.
Europe looked at that decision and suddenly became a lot less eurosceptical. It’s always the same with the far-right and populists: they talk the talk, but when it’s time to walk they often fall comically flat on their face (unfortunately, taking the rest of the country with them).
Meanwhile, the pro-Russian sympathisers (who include Farage) continue to grapple with the fact that their buddy Putin is a war criminal who has destabilised the globe and killed tens of thousands of people (mostly his own). Even Trump has now turned his back on the guy.
The world is increasingly seeing this disconnect in big ways and small. From Reform’s huge failures in councils, to Trump’s stock market crash that had a real-terms cost to American savers.
Voters have been under the spell of the far-right agitators for a number of years now, but in 2026 I predict the spell will be finally broken. We’ll see that play out in particular in two ways:
Democrats will take the House in the 2026 US elections
Orban will lose in Hungary
I’ll travel in a self-driving car in 2026 - but I won’t go to space
Every single week, 450,000 rides are taken in a self-driving Waymo car. These are rapidly becoming the norm in the US and China.
The UK and Europe, as ever, is behind the curve: an over-cautious, red-tape heavy approach to innovation tends to mean that we the consumers are the last to see the gains of tech evolution.
But the Labour government looks like they want to change that. They’ve brought forward approvals for self-driving cars on British roads to 2026 (originally planned for 2027).
Waymo and other firms plan to take advantage, but naysayers still insist the tech either won’t work on Britain’s dense, confusing streets: or that the risk-averse government will find a way to stall the rollout.
I’m optimistic, and I think I’ll take a ride in a self-driving car before 2026 ends.
I don’t think I’ll go to space (though never say never) - but I do think the space economy will see an extraordinary boom (metaphorically, hopefully).
Many people predict the AI bubble will burst next year. If it does, resources and talent will suddenly get cheaper: creating an opening for interesting and exciting companies like space-tech to make gains. Investment in space is already rising, the cost to get stuff into orbit is falling.
Space companies will do very well, I suspect.
Bubble bursts or not, Google will survive and thrive
By the way, none of this is investment advice.
Alphabet, the holding company formerly known as Google, will do very well next year, I expect.
Waymo, the leader in self-driving cars, is a subsidiary of Alphabet. Gemini is suddenly the best AI on the market, particularly in image and video generation. That cohort of people that remains vehemently opposed to AI eschew chatbots for … Google search.
History tells us that Google always wins in the end. They won on browsers, they won on mobile. They make the right bets and don’t waste their time on the wrong ones (see: VR).
If the market corrects, which almost everyone predicts it will, it will be brutal (and probably triggered by some development in China). The effects will not be reserved for tech: the entire economy will feel the shockwaves of an AI crash and a fall in valuations for the tech companies will ripple through to just about every fund.
Yet Google looks strong enough to weather the storm. As we saw from the dot-com bubble burst: the losers lose big and the winners win big. If Google can continue to win in AI, they’ll win big. And, either way, they have a suite of products with strong enough market share to keep things moving either way.
The Bills will reach the Super Bowl
OK, I’m hedging my bets a bit here. I’ve had a hunch since last year that the Buffalo Bills would win the Super Bowl. I’ve lost some confidence in them (and hey, it could be an Eagles - Bills Super Bowl, and I don’t want to be supporting the enemy) but I’ll stick to my guns that they’ll get there.
P.S. Happy New Year!