Good morning and welcome to White House Watch. Let’s talk about the split screen in America and Wall Street’s giddiness over coming deregulation.

America’s deep fissures were palpable yesterday as the nation processed the election results.

Reporting from Arizona and Nevada, the two states yet to call the presidential race, the FT’s Myles McCormick and Chris Grimes found both ecstasy and desolation. As Republicans teemed with excitement over Donald Trump’s win, Democrats appeared completely gutted.

Trump’s supporters were fired up about the president-elect’s agenda, and eager for him to enact his policies ASAP. With Republicans set to take control of the Senate — and a solid chance they’ll keep the House of Representatives — the party will have significant legislative power.

Bruce Parks, chair of the Washoe county Republicans in Nevada, told Myles that he looked forward to Trump making good on his promises to increase oil production, shut the border, deport undocumented workers.

Meanwhile, Democrats were conducting a postmortem [free to read].

Matt Bennett, co-founder of centrist Democratic think-tank Third Way, told the FT’s Lauren Fedor:

The Democratic brand is pretty bad. The country has shifted pretty far to the right, and we were not aware of how deep the problem ran.

The voters that we lost . . . looked at Democrats and said: they don’t understand my life. I don’t want them representing me.

Now they need to figure out how to get it together in the years to come. Democrats must craft an agenda that proves the party understands voters’ biggest concerns, said Obama White House alumnus Ken Baer: “We need a generational change. We have had a gerontocracy of 80-year-olds running the Democratic party since Obama left. We need new blood and new leaders.”

When it came down to it, Democrats lost on the economy.

Charles Franklin, a non-partisan pollster and director of the Marquette Law School Poll, told me that the “most pervasive” issue in Wisconsin and nationwide was the cost of living:

People saw their financial situation now is considerably worse than it was four years ago.

You can argue about the macro economic indicators, but you can’t argue with people’s subjective feelings of how they’re doing, and that’s clearly worse.

Transitional times: the latest headlines

What we’re hearing

With Trump’s White House return in sight, US bankers, private equity titans and other financial services executives are drooling over the prospect of deregulation and the chance to boot Biden’s aggressive watchdogs.

While Trump hasn’t said yet who will take the top financial roles in his administration, financial services companies are anticipating industry-friendly picks.

Republicans are expected to usher a more permissive approach to everything from bank capital requirements to takeovers and consumer protection rules in the financial services sector. They’re also likely to allow a new wave of financial products.

After leading the regulatory charge, Securities and Exchange Commission chair Gary Gensler has become the bane of the industry’s existence. With a new leader atop the SEC, money managers think Republicans will change rules that Gensler and other regulators have pushed through, and drop other contentious proposals.

Jack Inglis, chief executive of the Alternative Investment Management Association, told my colleagues: “We anticipate that the administration’s approach to financial regulation will be much more restrained and targeted . . . particularly when it comes to the SEC agenda.”

Many are also hoping Trump’s picks will adopt a more relaxed attitude to M&A than current antitrust officials Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter. This could spur a dealmaking spree, and in turn boost investment bank earnings and invigorate private equity firms.

But it’s not an entirely rosy picture. Vice president-elect JD Vance has praised some parts of Khan’s agenda. Trump was also all over the place on antitrust, blocking AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner because of his hatred for CNN, and he’s recently pledged to prevent Nippon Steel’s acquisition of US Steel.

Viewpoints

• Under Trump, investors will thrive on unstifled market forces, volatility and low taxes. But they risk ending up weaker later, warns John Foley in his latest Lex column. [Available for Premium subscribers]

• America’s Democrats are part of a global trend as they join a graveyard of incumbents this year, John Burn-Murdoch points out.

• Anger has become the defining feature of western politics, writes Robert Shrimsley. Quelling it must be a democratic imperative.

• Trump’s victory poses huge risks — and, possibly, a calamity — for the global economy and the post-1945 world order, writes the FT editorial board.

• Democrats threw away a winnable election, writes Janan Ganesh. The reason why stems back to a decision made on August 12 2020.

• FT readers reflect on the election result, sharing how they feel about Trump’s victory and how they view the outlook for the US.

EQUITY release allows homeowners aged 55 and over to unlock the equity that has built up in their homes as tax-free cash. But is equity release a good idea for you?

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It may allow you to unlock from a minimum of £10,000 up to 53% of the value of your property – providing it is worth at least £70,000.

The exact amount of money that you can access is based on the age of the youngest homeowner, the value of your home, and your individual needs.

Calculate how much you could unlock

What are the advantages of equity release?

It can be a flexible option with many different plan features to suit individual needs and requirements. For example, you can choose how you take the money you release, either as a lump sum or in smaller amounts over time.

One of the main benefits of equity release for many people is you’re not required to make any repayments if you don’t wish to, as the money you unlock, plus accrued interest, is repaid when you die or move into long-term care. 

Plus, with a lifetime mortgage, the most popular type of equity release plan, you continue to own 100% of the home you love.

Another advantage is that the money you unlock can be used for a variety of reasons; a new car, holiday, or even providing a financial gift to loved ones. As long as any existing mortgage is repaid first, the money is yours to enjoy spending.

Plans which meet the Equity Release Council’s standards feature a no negative equity guarantee.  This means that your estate will never owe more than the property is worth when it is sold.

Calculate how much you could unlock

What are the drawbacks?

With equity release, interest can build up over time on the amount you borrow which can be a significant amount.

With a lump sum plan where you take all the money in one go, you know exactly how much this will be when you take the loan.

With a drawdown plan, where you take the money in smaller amounts over time, you only pay interest on the money when you withdraw it, and the interest rate is typically the current rate at the time the funds are drawn.

Releasing equity could increase your income enough to make you ineligible for means tested benefits, now or in the future.

Equity release may involve a home reversion plan or a lifetime mortgage, which is secured against your property and the value of your estate will be reduced. This means that there will be less wealth to pass on to loved ones, and funding long-term care will be impacted by releasing the money tied up in your home.  

Equity release can be complex, and it is a long-term financial commitment so it’s important to get the right advice.

Calculate how much you could unlock

Is equity release a good idea for you?

It’s important to carefully consider the impact of equity release on your individual circumstances when evaluating if it is a good idea for you.

Advice is required before proceeding with equity release and a specialist advisor, such as those at Age Partnership, can talk you through the different options to help you find out if it could be right for your individual needs, or if another option could be better.  

Initial advice is provided for free and without obligation. Only if your case completes would an advice fee of £1,895 be payable. Other lender and solicitor fees may apply.

Calculate how much you could unlock

Age Partnership is a trading name of Age Partnership Limited, which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. FCA registered number 425432. Company registered in England and Wales No. 5265969. VAT registration number 162 9355 92. Registered address, 2200 Century Way, Thorpe Park, Leeds, LS15 8ZB.           

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Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world

The Wall Street Journal today has an interview with “Théo”, the mystery prediction-market trader who says he’ll make nearly $50mn on Polymarket by betting on Donald Trump winning the US presidency.

It offers some interesting new information about his apparent edge:

Théo argued that pollsters should use what are known as neighbor polls that ask respondents which candidates they expect their neighbors to support. The idea is that people might not want to reveal their own preferences, but will indirectly reveal them when asked to guess who their neighbors plan to vote for.

Théo cited a handful of publicly released polls conducted in September using the neighbor method alongside the traditional method. These polls showed Harris’s support was several percentage points lower when respondents were asked who their neighbors would vote for, compared with the result that came from directly asking which candidate they supported. 

To Théo, this was evidence that pollsters were—once again—underestimating Trump’s support. The data helped convince him to put on his long-shot bet that Trump would win the popular vote. At the time that Théo made those wagers, bettors on Polymarket were assessing the chances of a Trump popular-vote victory at less than 40%.

As Théo celebrated the returns on Election Night, he disclosed another piece of the analysis behind his successful wager. In an email, he told the Journal that he had commissioned his own surveys to measure the neighbor effect, using a major pollster whom he declined to name. The results, he wrote, “were mind blowing to the favor of Trump!” 

Théo declined to share those surveys, saying his agreement with the pollster required him to keep the results private. But he argued that U.S. pollsters should use the neighbor method in future surveys to avoid another embarrassing miss.

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“Public opinion would have been better prepared if the latest polls had measured that neighbor effect,” Théo said.

Théo’s hunch has been proved right, but does the methodology stack up? According to the experts, it’s impossible to know.

“Unless the evidence is put into the public domain with tables (often missing for many US polls) it is frankly impossible to comment,” Sir John Curtice, professor of politics at Strathclyde University, told FTAV.

Though only a few papers have been published that test the accuracy of so-called nominative opinion polls, the wisdom of crowds remains an active area of research. James Surowiecki’s 2004 pop-sociology bestseller of the same name sets out the argument that decentralised groups of independent, diverse thinkers can provide unbiased estimates of reality. More recent work — such as this paper from Roni Lehrer, Sebastian Juhl and Thomas Gschwend of Mannheim University — has applied to elections the principle that crowds are fairly good at guessing what “share of the population has [a] socially undesirable characteristic”.

Building on the theme is Predicting Elections: a ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ Approach by Martin Boon, co-founder of Deltapoll. His study concludes that while know-thy-neighbour polling can be more accurate than conventional surveys, the method is “more than capable of producing seriously misleading predictions”.

Crowd-wisdom polling outperformed the best conventional poll for the UK 2010 general election, Boon finds, but was a notably poor predictor when applied to the outcomes of the 2011 Welsh referendums on devolution powers and voting reform.

Wisdom polls struggle when a high proportion of the electorate doesn’t understand the question, he suggests:

When our general election prediction proved accurate, most people had the advantage of both a basic understanding of British politics at general election time, and a prompted understanding of how each party had fared at the previous election. In short, they had enough information to be smart. However, this may not have been the case in the referenda; both were characterised by the electorate’s limited understanding.

Making people take a view about whether the public would prefer proportional representation to first-past-the-post delivered superficial answers that grouped like a coin flip around the median point of 50 per cent, Boon finds. Their predictive powers improved in all cases when given information around which to frame an answer, such as the result of a previous vote, the trade-off being that prompted questions introduce potential biases. And even then, given a difficult question, voting-intention polling methods still won out.

How informed and engaged the US electorate was in this year’s presidential election is being explored at length elsewhere, as is the possibility that systematic biases skewed conventional polls. Whether one trader’s private polling tapped sentiment more accurately than the publicly available surveys, or whether statistical noise just happened to reinforce his confidence to buy a dollar for 40c, can’t be known without seeing the data.

Whichever way, the bet on Trump winning the popular vote was not quite as contrarian as the risk-and-reward of a binary market makes it appear. “A 40 per cent chance is quite high!” said Curtice:

In any event the polls were not far off. [They] probably underestimated Trump relative to Harris by 4 points and by less than that in most of the swing states. Nobody would have noticed such errors if the election had not been as close as it was.

That’s not to deny that the polls still have a bit of a problem estimating Trump — but finding the source of an error as small as the one this time around will not be easy.

Further reading:
— Take political betting markets literally, not seriously (FTAV)

There’s a battle going on for control of the global semiconductor industry – the chips that are in virtually every piece of electronics we use from our phones to our cars to the latest AI software. For the past half century, chips have quietly powered the technological revolution. In this series, James Kynge goes deep into the miracle of modern chip manufacturing and the struggle over who commands its future.

Presented by James Kynge. Edwin Lane is the senior producer. The producer is Josh Gabert-Doyon. Executive producer is Manuela Saragosa. Sound design by Breen Turner and Samantha Giovinco, with original music from Metaphor Music. The FT’s head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Special thanks to Tim Bradshaw.

View our accessibility guide.

UAE is undoubtedly one of the best places to find properties with the highest return on investment. Over the years, things have become really investor-friendly. In 2023, the country saw a massive boost in foreign direct investment, reaching $30.69 billion, which marks a 34.97% increase from the previous year. This upward trend underscores the growing confidence in the market, showcasing why finding the best investment properties for sale in UAE remains a lucrative opportunity for investors.

But what makes a property an attractive investment opportunity in UAE? And what are some of the top investment properties currently available in the country? Let’s dive in and guide you through finding the best investment properties in UAE that will bring you high returns in 2025 and beyond.

Signs of the Best Investment Properties for Sale in UAE

Here are some key signs to look out for when searching for the best investment properties for sale in UAE:

Location

Location is the most important factor when hunting for top investment properties in the UAE. But with so many options available, how do you choose the best location? Well, if it’s your first time, then we’ll recommend Dubai Marina. It is a stunning residential area known for its calming vibe, glamorous lifestyle, and towering skyscrapers. Called “The Tallest Block in the World,” Dubai Marina offers amazing marina views with various properties, from high-rise apartments to luxurious hotels.

Then, there’s Downtown Dubai, filled with energy and home to the iconic Burj Khalifa. Here, property choices range from cozy studios to spacious 5-bed townhouses. Prices for these high-end apartments start from AED 3,570,373. Downtown Dubai is perfect for those who want easy access to shopping malls, schools, and great entertainment like the Dubai Mall and Dubai Fountain.

And don’t forget about Palm Jumeirah, a jaw-dropping man-made island shaped like a palm tree. This fascinating island offers everything you need, from fun leisure activities to delightful dining options and pristine private beaches. If you invest in a property here, expect to get a very high rental return, especially during peak tourist seasons.

Infrastructure Development

The UAE’s property market has flourished in the last few years, driven by strategic investments and supportive government policies. The increase in foreign direct investment is living proof of the confidence investors have in this ever-evolving landscape. Key to this growth is the solid infrastructure development across the nation. 

The Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure has implemented 129 development projects worth approximately AED 11.8 billion as part of the ministry’s five-year plan (2018-2023). This extensive development has increased demand for properties, making UAE one of the hottest investment spots globally.

Market Trends

Staying updated with the latest market trends is crucial when searching for top investment properties in UAE. One noteworthy trend is the growing popularity of off-plan properties or projects that are still under construction. These offer attractive payment plans and flexible options, making them a preferred choice for many investors. In 2023 alone, Dubai recorded 57,360 off-plan property transactions, a 48% increase from 2022. The success of these off-plan projects shows a promising future for investors looking for high returns.

Rental Yields

When it comes to rental yields, the UAE is shining bright! In the first quarter of 2024, the average gross rental yield was 5.16%, which is an amazing increase from 4.93% in the third quarter of 2023. This rise shows how strong and exciting the property market is becoming in the UAE. For investors, such high rental yields mean more money in their pockets. It’s like getting a bigger piece of a delicious pie! So, if you’re looking to invest, the UAE is the place to be for exciting rental returns.

3 Best Investment Properties for Sale in UAE

Now that you know what makes a property an attractive investment opportunity and the key signs to look out for, let’s take a look at the 3 best investment properties for sale in UAE.

Number 1. Apartment in TIGER SKY TOWER

How wonderful would it be to start your day in a stunning 2-bedroom apartment located right in the bustling heart of Dubai’s Business Bay? Welcome to the TIGER SKY TOWER. With its generous 144.87 square meters of living space, this apartment is designed for comfort and relaxation.

You will have two elegant bathrooms to complement the luxurious living space, and being just 450 meters from the sea, the location couldn’t be more ideal for those who love the ocean breeze. Priced at 4 771 665 AED, this property not only provides you with modern living but also great value, situated close to Dubai’s vibrant city centre.

Number 2. Apartment in Beach Walk

Imagine living in a cozy apartment in the beautiful Beach Walk area of Dubai. This fabulous place features 2 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms, offering a comfortable living space of 93 square meters. It’s close to the sea, just 350 meters away, making it perfect for anyone who loves the beach.

The apartment is priced at 3,300,000 AED, giving you a chance to invest in a valuable property in a prime location in Dubai. If you invest in this property, you’ll also enjoy a range of amenities such as gymnasiums, restaurants and cafes, and breathtaking views of the surrounding area.

Number 3. Apartment in Beach Walk

Discover the stunning Apartment in Beach Walk, Dubai, UAE, a remarkable investment opportunity with elegant features and a prime location. This luxurious property contains 2 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms, providing a generous living space of 93 square meters. Strategically located just 350 meters away from the beautiful sea, this apartment offers both comfort and convenience.

With its exquisite design and access to various amenities, this property promises a harmonious lifestyle in one of Dubai’s sought-after areas. Priced at 3,300,000 AED, it represents an exceptional investment potential.

Conclusion

So, there you have it! A complete guide to finding the best investment properties for sale in UAE. Who doesn’t want to invest in a booming real estate market that offers high rental yields, incredible infrastructure development, and a wide range of property options? Be it the luxurious Palm Jumeirah or the lively Downtown Dubai, you just can’t go wrong with any investment in the UAE. Happy investing!

Want to know more? Visit https://emirates.estate/.