I used to be a commodity trader in the 1990s.  This wasn’t my day job, which was to forecast supply & demand, but I had the statistical skills to develop automated trading strategies for the traders I worked with.  These were either based on moving averages of futures prices (known as technical trading) or buy/sell signals based on the underlying supply & demand picture (known as fundamental trading).  I don’t trade commodities now but I’ve applied the stats skills I learned then to many time series since including those for elections and voting intentions.

Another trading strategy I could have used but didn’t was Chartism.  I vividly remember the training course I did on this and coming away gobsmacked.  How on earth were people being allowed to buy and sell millions using nothing more than astrology, spiritualism, numerology and other superstitions?!  I immediately swore of from Chartism and have managed to stay away from it until this year.  I hope you understand why it’s taken me many months to build up the courage to publish two articles where I use chartist superstitions instead of statistics to interpret long term trends in the vote shares of the major parties in the UK.

For this article, I explain why my charts show the Cursed Ratios of British voters are 52 : 26 : 13 : 6.5.  For my next article, I will have you fearing for my sanity…

[Read more…] about UK General Elections #10A – The Cursed Ratios of British Politics