12 days until Britain goes to the polls

It's twelve days, 7 hours and 6 minutes until the UK decides on the next bunch of clowns to run the circus

To be honest I've been shying away from posting poll after poll and news on the election as it's just noise from dawn till dusk.

Take today's poll news, We've had one showing a 41% to 29% Con/Lab poll, a 35% to 32% Lab/Con poll and a 44% to 32% Lab/Con poll. One was done in London, one was run just with over 50's and the other was probably asking all left handed people with green eyes or something just as silly. The whole country is going poll crazy and all it does is muddy the waters

The fact of the matter is that the indications are that it's going to be a very tight result, based on the polls ;-) At the moment the current coalition looks like it won't get the seats needed to maintain power

The latest chart from Daiwa Capital Markets Grant Lewis shows how close things are.

*Dotted line represents the number of seats required for a majority. Source: ElectionForecast and Daiwa Capital Markets Europe Ltd

Grant has a pretty good write up that's worth a gander

At the moment the pound isn't fully in election mode yet. That could all change as the clock ticks down and it's likely to ramp up after the FOMC has died down

The risk at the moment is that the market is underestimating (or ignoring) the possibility of a lengthy period of political wrangling if a ruling government cannot be formed. That uncertainty alone will worry the pound, let alone whatever the final outcome

So I've got to wear two hats for this. One as a countryman and one as a trader. I'll get my political view out into the open first off so that I can't be accused of bias with my coverage. I'm not big into politics and I'm pretty straight down the middle

They're all useless but I side with the least useless of them. I don't particularly like Labour after their last stint in charge, and by design or luck the current lot have done ok to steer us back to some sort of normality. The old problems are still there with debt and whatnot but I'm really not interested in getting into the ins and outs of it on here. Much like trading I like to keep it simple and it's a simple case of judging what's in front of me at the time

With my trading hat on it's also a easy to categorise the trading bias. Keep much the same government as we have now and the market will be happy. Change to the opposition and there will be tremors. If it's all up in the air then it will be messy until it's sorted

As the news comes out in the run up, pigeon holing it into the three scenarios should make it easy to define any moves we get. As the days pass we will try to judge when the politics is seeping into the prices amongst all the other noise

Both Mike and I will try to keep everything in a manageable format and give as broad an outline of proceedings as we can. Much like I advised with today's Greek news and the euro, don't get too married to these latest pound moves as it can all change in an instant if the market gets the election bug

Roll on GE2015