Mercury's Blog

The US election is just over a week away, and with that there are a few different topics I’d like to touch on. With the explosion in new prediction markets since the last presidential election, we should see some interesting (but hopefully consistent) results.

• First, a great post from Koleman Strumpf on Midas Oracle points out that half of all trades on the Betfair exchange in 2004 occurred on Election Day! While I personally think that was quite likely due to the early exit poll news for Kerry and the subsequent swing back to Bush, it proves that there are still quite a few people that may be waiting until the very last day to trade.
• Jason Ruspini just started a new thread on the Prediction Markets e-mail group regarding some divergences he’s seen between prices on InTrade and fivethirtyeight.com.

  While I think some of the things he’s observed is due to the way Nate Silver presents data on his site, Jason brings up a very good point. A thorough analysis of movement in the InTrade prediction markets should be compared to the daily calculated win percentage from fivethirtyeight (where all data comes strictly from polls). I think it could be very revealing, and give the public quite a bit more data on the accuracy of polling, aggregation of polls, and prediction markets.

• A long time ago I started four different markets on Inkling Markets that will hopefully predict control over each house of Congress, and the number of seats each party will have after the election. Data is shown here:
  
  
  (as I write this, the Democratic percentage is 53.8%, which corresponds to 234 seats in the House of Representatives.)
  
  
• I may need to update my post on prediction market software soon. Xpree (founded by Mat Fogarty, and recently joined by Leslie Fine, a well known prediction market researcher from HP) may be changing their name. The top three picks according to their contest on NameThis were:
  1. Metricast
  2. UREprojection
  3. Keymet

  Personally, I don’t like #2 or #3, but Metricast sounds interesting. It also sounds like a much better fit to what they do than “Xpree.”

  Good luck to them, if they choose to go down this route.

• Do you speak Danish? Nosco is hiring!
  For English speakers, so is InTrade and Xpree.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 1:19 am and is filed under General, Play-money Markets, Real-money Markets, Summary.