Category Archives: Analysis (Meta)

BetFair makes the frontpage of the New York Times -as the White Knight of sports. – Note that the term prediction markets is never pronounced. – TradeSports is not mentioned, but the last paragraph of the article suggests that all Internet sports betting should be legal and regulated.

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Previously: BetFair&#8217-s Mark Davies on sports betting and the fight against corruption

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Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • Excellent article about enterprise prediction markets and Inkling Markets —with a good word for Robin Hanson, who invented MSR.
  • HubDub limitations
  • BetFair Developer Program use Joomla! as their blog software (and CMS).
  • Lawsuit aiming at compelling the office of the United States trade representative to produce a copy of its compensation settlement with the European Union over the United States’ withdrawal of gambling services from the General Agreement on Trade in Services.
  • Iraq War = “not necessary”, “a serious strategic blunder” — US News Media = “complicit enablers” in the manipulation of the public (“the propaganda campaign”) — George W. Bush turned away “from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed.”
  • JASON RUSPINI’S CROCKERY: The Brain states forcefully that they are not “event futures”, but “binary options”. Still, as soon as he premieres prediction markets on tax rates at InTrade, he calls them “tax futures” —of course.
  • Tasmania’s Prime Minister who licenced BetFair Australia departs “abruptly”.

FINALLY, THE PREDICTION MARKETS ARRIVE IN GREAT BRITAIN.

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The image above is static &#8212-it&#8217-s a screen shot of the chart widget, not the chart widget itself. (I haven&#8217-t had access to their code, see, so I am not able to embed it here for you.) To view their updated widget, right-click on the image above, and open the link into a new browser tab.

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  1. First time I see a big UK newspaper associates &#8220-BetFair&#8221- with the term &#8220-prediction markets&#8221-.
  2. Their explainer is quite acceptable.
  3. That is a great step for BetFair. Congrats.
  4. I&#8217-d explain things differently &#8212-and I dislike that they suggest that the prediction markets can greatly outperform the polls, described as not &#8220-accurate enough&#8221-. Pollsters do the best they can, it seems to me.
  5. The output that BetFair hands out and the journalists seek are probabilities (expressed in percentages) &#8212-not those damn decimal/digital odds.
  6. The chart widget they use is crappy. I already discussed it. It has usability problems with FireFox. It does not go into feeds. And it&#8217-s not readable enough. Look at the alternative, just below. (The only reason those idiots of journalists are using that crappy widget is that BetFair customized it for them, by putting their fucking newspaper trademark on top of the widget.)
  7. Anyway, the dead-tree, print newspapers are dying, and the future belongs to blog networks. :-D

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The chart below is better&#8230- more readable&#8230- and it goes into feeds&#8230- – But those idiots at the Telegraph won&#8217-t show it to you because it is not pinned with the &#8220-Telegraph&#8221- trademark.

Please, BetFair, do give us the possibility to have a wider time period for the chart data.

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Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • A second look at HedgeStreet’s comment to the CFTC about “event markets”
  • Since YooPick opened their door, Midas Oracle has been getting, daily, 2 or 3 dozens referrals from FaceBook.
  • US presidential hopeful John McCain hates the Midas Oracle bloggers.
  • If you have tried to contact Chris Masse thru the Midas Oracle Contact Form, I’m terribly sorry to inform you that your message was not delivered to the recipient.
  • THE CFTC’s SECRET AGENDA —UNVEILED.
  • “Over a ten-year period commencing on January 1, 2008, and ending on December 31, 2017, the S & P 500 will outperform a portfolio of funds of hedge funds, when performance is measured on a basis net of fees, costs and expenses.”
  • Meet professor Thomas W. Malone (on the right), from the MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence.

Putting the prediction markets under the big crowdsourcing tent

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Via Keith Anderson (Senior Analyst at RNG)

Chapter 7 – What the Crowd Knows: Collective Intelligence in Action – by Jeff Howe

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He is a Wired journalist.

I prefer stuff written by economists like Robin Hanson, Justin Wolfers, Eric Zitzewitz, Koleman Strumpf, David Pennock, etc.

What&#8217-s the point of having the mainstream media journalists writing their own stuff when we can cite the people listed above????

I believe in the &#8220-In His/Her Own Words&#8221- principle.

Enough with the journalists. I&#8217-m fed up by them.

The Internet enables us to access directly the people who know. Let&#8217-s bypass the journalists. Let&#8217-s bulldozer this unnecessary filter.

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Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • A second look at HedgeStreet’s comment to the CFTC about “event markets”
  • Since YooPick opened their door, Midas Oracle has been getting, daily, 2 or 3 dozens referrals from FaceBook.
  • US presidential hopeful John McCain hates the Midas Oracle bloggers.
  • If you have tried to contact Chris Masse thru the Midas Oracle Contact Form, I’m terribly sorry to inform you that your message was not delivered to the recipient.
  • THE CFTC’s SECRET AGENDA —UNVEILED.
  • “Over a ten-year period commencing on January 1, 2008, and ending on December 31, 2017, the S & P 500 will outperform a portfolio of funds of hedge funds, when performance is measured on a basis net of fees, costs and expenses.”
  • Meet professor Thomas W. Malone (on the right), from the MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence.

If you want to increase the absolute accuracy of the outputs of the prediction markets, try (if you can) to increase the quality of the inputs.

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Wanna better political prediction markets? Ask Gallup to generate better polls &#8212-because that&#8217-s what traders eat for breakfast.

I have been telling that to Barry Ritholtz &#8212-but he stays on his position.

Thanks to Barry for listening.

Let&#8217-s move on to another polemique.

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Yet another guy, writing about prediction markets in the mainstream media, who does not master what he is talking about.

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Via Adam Siegel of Inkling Markets,

John McQuaid of Wired.

  1. It&#8217-s incoherent to start a rant against prediction markets by this upbeat line, &#8220-Prediction markets can be spookily accurate.&#8221-
  2. He blames the New Hampshire upset on poor liquidity. Where is the scientific evidence of that? Total invention by our good friend Barry Ritholtz. The New Hampshire prediction markets were wrong because the advanced, primary indicators (the polls) were wrong. As simple as that. [For why the polls were wrong, see: The New York Times, Zogby, Rasmussen, Gallup…]
  3. Prediction markets &#8220-have a lot of political junkies but few real insiders or outsiders, so they&#8217-re not very good at catching something the polls might miss.&#8221- Hummm&#8230- Most of the &#8220-real insiders&#8221- don&#8217-t keep scoops for themselves (if and when they have some), they are too happy to act as a source for some thirsty journalists or bloggers, so as to have their name printed somewhere. Hence, the political junkies would be able to aggregate any kind of extraordinary information &#8212-if that were to happen.
  4. How could the prediction markets &#8220-get out ahead of conventional wisdom&#8221-? It&#8217-s impossible, other than by reversing our psychological arrow of time (remembering the future, instead of the past). At the contrary, the job of the prediction markets is to quantify exactly that so-called &#8220-conventional wisdom&#8221-. They won&#8217-t go further, and we&#8217-re happy to run with that, because, that way, we are not prisoner of the bias of a handful of experts. Plus, prediction markets give us an objective probability of event outcome &#8212-a thing that individual experts can&#8217-t give us.

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The excerpt below is good enough, though:

[…] But forecasting also needs more so-called noise traders, who do business with almost no information. Noise traders boost accuracy by increasing volume and the potential profits of informed traders. Diversity helps, too. If you can get different types of people to play, experts say, not only do you get a bigger pool and more information, but differing random guesses will cancel each other out, leaving real signals to rise above the noise. Plus, if you have a critical mass of investors with a variety of backgrounds, locations, and interests, they are less likely to move as a herd. […]

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Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • A second look at HedgeStreet’s comment to the CFTC about “event markets”
  • Since YooPick opened their door, Midas Oracle has been getting, daily, 2 or 3 dozens referrals from FaceBook.
  • US presidential hopeful John McCain hates the Midas Oracle bloggers.
  • If you have tried to contact Chris Masse thru the Midas Oracle Contact Form, I’m terribly sorry to inform you that your message was not delivered to the recipient.
  • THE CFTC’s SECRET AGENDA —UNVEILED.
  • “Over a ten-year period commencing on January 1, 2008, and ending on December 31, 2017, the S & P 500 will outperform a portfolio of funds of hedge funds, when performance is measured on a basis net of fees, costs and expenses.”
  • Meet professor Thomas W. Malone (on the right), from the MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence.

Felix Salmon rebuts Mark Gongloff.

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Excellent.

Ex=ce=llent.

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Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • Become “friend” with me on Google E-Mail so as to share feed items with me within Google Reader.
  • Nigel Eccles’ flawed “vision” about HubDub shows that he hasn’t any.
  • How does InTrade deal with insider trading?
  • Modern Life
  • “The Beacon” is an excellent blog published by The Independent Institute.
  • The John Edwards Non-Affair… is making Memeorandum (twice), again.
  • Prediction Markets = marketplaces for information trading… and for separating the wheat from the chaff.

Using enterprise prediction markets too early in the innovation process is BAD.

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Jed Christiansen:

I don&#8217-t think that prediction markets need to be the incentive.

I think that when it comes to generating ideas, you need to be as open and inclusive as possible. The process should allow anyone that submits or helps develop an idea to share in any rewards from that idea. Once it&#8217-s developed, then it can move to a stage where you can do forecasting via a prediction market.

Using a prediction market too early can do two things:
1- Poor forecasting due to social influence.
2- Limit revolutionary new ideas. It&#8217-s too easy to short an idea that looks strange, when in fact it looks odd because it&#8217-s revolutionary. The idea process should foster and develop ideas, not make them compete against each other.

I&#8217-m glad to have sparked a little discussion here.

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Previously: Innovation Mechanism = Voting Mechanism + Prediction Market Mechanism

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Dont ask the experts. Ask the prediction markets. They know better.

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George Tziralis should have refined a bit the statement he made in the first video below &#8212-statement which I have slightly modified in the title above. We need inputs from the primary, advanced indicators, the experts, and the prediction markets. We need all of that. The prediction markets will never eliminate either the polls or the experts. The prediction markets come as a supplement in the mix.
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Ask Markets

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Mathematically speaking, as the saying goes, no one wins the lottery. Sports betting, by contrast, involves skill, and it is possible, although very difficult, to consistently win money on it. Sports bettors are closer to stock or commodities buyers than to people who buy lottery tickets. How much d

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Guess who said that in 2006.

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Previously: BetFair&#8217-s Mark Davies on sports betting

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