Tag Archives: Forecasting

Spot the red line. I like the idea of this comparison.

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Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • If Midas Oracle were to meet, would we use Huddle, and why?
  • WORLD’S SUCH A SMALL PLACE: Smarkets meet HubDub.
  • 50% of our prediction market luminaries have a MacBook.
  • STRAIGHT FROM OUR TRUISM DEPARTMENT: Money buys happiness.
  • Ron Paul (R) and Barney Frank (D) ally together to attack “the practical hurdles of the federal law, known as the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, rather than its legitimacy”.
  • Clicking on the “SPHERE: RELATED CONTENT” button, at the bottom of each Midas Oracle post, will bring you a list of external webspots.
  • FRIGHTENING: Jed Christiansen’s prediction market blog was briefly overtaken by web spammers, who inserted invisible links to their commercial sites so as to game the Google PageRank system.

Are you a better predictor than John McCain?

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No GravatarVia Bo Cowgill of Google, via Foreign Policy, John McCain:

John McCain

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They would do anything to sell politics, these days. :-D

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Foreign Policy:

It&#8217-s a clever marketing ploy by team McCain, but why stop there? Why not have the candidate take positions in predictions markets such as Intrade? Wouldn&#8217-t we rather know how prescient Senator McCain is about the odds of bird flu striking the United States by the end of September, the chances Pervez Musharraf will step down as Pakistan&#8217-s president anytime soon, or the likelihood of a peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinians by January 2009? Put your money where your mouth is, senator.

InTrade-TradeSports and BetFair-TradeFair should let traders opt to make public their positions, and they should create dynamic prediction registries and leagues.

Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • Red Herring’s list of the top 100 North-American high-tech startups includes Inkling Markets —but not NewsFutures, Consensus Point, or Xpree.
  • Professor Koleman Strumpf explains the prediction markets to the countryland people.
  • Professor Koleman Strumpf tells CNN that a prediction market, by essence, can’t predict an upset.
  • Time magazine interview the 2 BetFair-Tradefair co-founders, and not a single time do they pronounce the magic words, “prediction markets”.
  • One Deep Throat told me that this VC firm might have been connected with the Irish prediction exchange, at inception.
  • BetFair Rapid = BetFair’s standalone, local, PC-based, order-entry software for prediction markets
  • Michael Moore tells the Democratic people to go Barack Obama in Pennsylvania (a two-tier state), but the polls and the prediction markets tell us that that won’t do the trick.

Inkling Markets, one year later

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Much, much better. Last year at the same time, in March 2007, I was selectively critical of some of the statements they did put in their (now old) version of their website. Adam Siegel has made good progress in mastering and conveying the problematic of enterprise prediction markets. I think that if Inkling Markets can truly deliver a service that can help companies mitigate business risks, and if they can prove positive results, then their client roll could be multiplied by a factor of 1,000 or so in the next 10 years.

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Adam Siegel:

Two years ago the only way to run a prediction marketplace was to roll your own or call a vendor/consultant and have them set up software and run markets for you. It took many weeks, often months. Today with Inkling Markets it take seconds. […]

[#1] Improve forecasting of key performance indicators
Track and raise awareness of key success metrics to identify and mitigate risk factors before it&#8217-s too late.

[#2] Expose product quality problems early
Identify design and production anomalies before a product (physical or virtual) is brought to market to avoid expensive repairs and recalls.

[#3] Predict risk to your supply chain
Run a &#8220-web&#8221- of markets about the risk factors to your supply chain to predict internal and external events that would cause inefficiencies or disruptions.

[#4] Foster a culture of innovation
Determine which new ideas and process improvements will have real business impact vs. the &#8220-nice to have.&#8221-

[#5] Create new interactions with users
Build a dedicated community of users around a marketplace of questions relevant to your business area and brand. […]

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Adam Siegel (Inkling Markets CEO) in Forbes:

[Prediction markets] can significantly:

  1. improve forecasts of key performance indicators,
  2. provide a more realistic understanding of project-completion dates,
  3. identify quality-control problems early in the development life cycle,
  4. improve demand forecasts within the supply chain,
  5. and allocate resources more appropriately across research-and-development projects.

[I have edited the formatting of this excerpt.]

NewsFutures Emile Servan-Schreiber has two lines of defense for the prediction markets.

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And a slam at the InTrade fanboys:

[&#8230-] The classic first line of defense in these cases is to remind people that market “predictions” are really just probabilities [*], so any one outcome cannot invalidate the approach. The argument is sound and backed up by loads of data. But it would of course be much more convincing if we, as an industry, would remember to show at least as much humility when our market “predictions” appear correct instead. If you’re going to spread the idea that your market called all 50 states in the last U.S. presidential election because each correct outcome was predicted with over 50% chance, then you can’t hide behind probabilities when an 80% prediction comes to naught, as in Obama’s NH collapse. [&#8230-]

Excellent point, my Lord.

[*] Note that Midas Oracle is stuffed with phrases like &#8220-probabilistic predictions expressed in percentages&#8221-, and full of charts showing these probabilities.

Go reading his second point, now.

[&#8230-] capturing the consensus opinion in a much finer and dynamic way than all the amorphous media buzz [&#8230-]

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TECHNICAL NOTE:

Because NewsFutures is a strictly hierarchical company, I assume the piece is from EJSS, even though our smart man did not sign it. Bad Karma. Anonymous texts have no weight on the Internet.

On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.

Author Profile&nbsp-Editor and Publisher of Midas Oracle .ORG .NET .COM &#8212- Chris Masse&#8217-s mugshot &#8212- Contact Chris Masse &#8212- Chris Masse&#8217-s LinkedIn profile &#8212- Chris Masse&#8217-s FaceBook profile &#8212- Chris Masse&#8217-s Google profile &#8212- Sophia-Antipolis, France, E.U. Read more from this author&#8230-

Read the previous blog posts by Chris. F. Masse:

  • Good news: The BetFair blog now features a prediction market column. — Bad news: Their columnist is an anonymous writer with long hair… and dubious skills.
  • Once again, a BetFair spin doctor misunderstands the prediction market approach.
  • Grandizer
  • Tss… Tss… Surely, you are joking Doctor Giberson.
  • Comments are still open on Midas Oracle.
  • “I am much more aligned with InTrade than you are, Chris.”
  • And the award for the most technology advanced software vendor goes to… the envelope, please…. QMARKETS in Israel. … [Cheers and applauses in the crowd.]