Prediction Markets – Keeping the info and charting it
May 21st, 2009
I’ve been blogging here about prediction markets for two and a half years. In that time, a lot of discussion has taken place both here and elsewhere about specific prediction market contracts; what happened on those markets and when.
One of the problems with prediction markets is that the information from them is not just valuable when it’s “live” but also after the market has finished and been closed out. It would be useful to go back and observe changes in markets over time, and even more valuable to compare markets to each other. Unfortunately, the data is largely useless to the various vendors and typically gets deleted after a certain period of time. (Though the real-money markets like InTrade do tend to protect their data as a valuable asset.)
I’ve recently found a solution that could prove quite useful to the prediction market industry: Timetric.
The Future
Timetric is essentially YouTube for time-series data. Their current library of charts (nearly 100k time-series) includes everything from exchange rates to crime data to Twitter replies. These can be manipulated, compared, layered on top of each other, and more. Their standard charts can be easily dropped into blog posts, and the raw data easily exported for manipulation elsewhere. (Full disclosure: I’m friends with the founders, three very smart PhD’s from Cambridge University.)
In my ideal future Timetric would be the home for all prediction market data. Users could compare how InTrade, NewsFutures, and Inkling performed over time on the 2008 election. Those political charts could be compared to economic data or virtually anything else to draw further conclusions. In fact, Timetric is now being used in Guardian blogs (a UK newspaper) to enhance coverage; an example is here.
This is an example of an embedded chart. (It doesn’t display correctly in Google Reader, so please click to see the original post.) Be sure to tick the “Multiple Axes” box for the full effect.
A year and a half ago at the London Prediction Markets conference a number of people talked about what the prediction market industry should do; one of the big ideas was a warehouse for old prediction market data. Now that warehouse doesn’t need to be built; Timetric has done it. All we need to do is fill it with data.
The Challenge for Prediction Market software vendors
My challenge to software vendors is to create feeds that can be easily imported into Timetric. Don’t throw away your data… give it away to someone who values it!
While it’s not explicity stated on their site, they can easily take RSS feeds (specifically Atom) of data. This means that as people trade on contracts the Timetric will be able to update data for the contract nearly automatically. Doing so will make prediction market data permanent, and widely available to academics and the public. It will enable individuals to do their own experimentation and potentially be a great tool for prediction market enthusiasts to debate the merits of methods and approaches for different markets.
Software vendors can also provide a simple CSV or XLS file with datetime information in the first column and values in the second column. While it won’t update like Atom feeds, it does provide the same data for easy import into Timetric.
- So what prediction market software companies are open to creating an Atom feed of contract data?
- What companies will provide data for a permanent archive?
May 22nd, 2009 at 7:36 pm
[...] See Jed Christiansen for how prediction exchanges and prediction market analysts could make use of t…, but I dislike the fact that Timetric charts don’t go into feeds. [...]