Tag Archives: Midas Oracle

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No GravatarI have been fighting comment spammers for weeks, and I think I&#8217-ve finally found the right combo:

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  6. I use &#8220-NoFollow Free&#8221- (it allows the commenters&#8217- links to be computed by the Google PageRank system)-
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Read the previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • GLOBAL COOLING
  • Sikorsky X2 = coaxial main rotors + rear-facing tail rotor
  • Linear Programming – Combined Value Trading – Parimutuel Call Market – Combinatorial Call Markets
  • Cash Rewards for Innovations
  • Let’s blog and dig about the Future.
  • OSCARS 2008: The Hollywood Stock Exchange has been more accurate than InTrade.
  • Right-click on the image below, open the link in another browser tab, and click on “OK”… to subscribe to InTrade’s iGoogle widget.

Midas Oracle is incontestably [*] the best vertical portal to prediction markets.

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Jeremy:

This site has more than you need to know about futures markets and the subtle point that they don’t predict but rather capture what people think will happen. Clear?

My dual strategy is paying off.

  1. Presenting a prediction market chart associated with an explainer about prediction markets on the blog frontpage &#8212-on top of the daily posts, making the reading of this introductory material compulsory for our visitors.
  2. Publishing, again, the explainer on prediction markets on top of the page grouping the current prediction market charts. This &#8220-predictions&#8221- page has been the more popular material on Midas Oracle, these last 30 days.

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[*] Overcoming Bias and Freakonomics are not prediction market blogs. And they didn&#8217-t take my challenge to comment on the BetFair Starting Prices.

The Best External Web Links On Prediction Markets And On Everything Else

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No GravatarFolks,

I have just updated the &#8220-Links&#8221- page. Could you right-click on that link, open the link in another browser tab, scan the long list, spot what&#8217-s missing, and contact me so I can add new web links? Thanks.

There are 304 links, there. Here are the 15 categories:

– Associations
– Blogs
– Books
– Exchanges &#038- Markets
– Experts &#038- Scholars
– Forums
– Media
– Midas Oracle Network
– References
– Search Engines
– Shared Readings
– Social Favorites
– Software
– Think Tanks
– Tools

Read the previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • Is Justin Wolfers a libertarian? Probably not.
  • The information technology that caught Eliot Spitzer
  • Eric Zitzewitz’s 10 minutes of fame
  • Fun with conditional probabilities
  • Wrongly Crafted Headlines Of The Day
  • an American, petite, very pretty brunette, 5 feet 5 inches, and 105 pounds
  • Mississippi: Is it a primary or a caucus?

Midas Oracle is the only popular, independent, exhaustive, multi-author, multi-exchange, Web-based resource on prediction markets.

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Dear Midas Oracle readers,

I&#8217-m happy to report progress in building the architecture and content of our group blog, Midas Oracle. Let me introduce you to our 2 master pages: &#8220-PREDICTIONS&#8221- and &#8220-BEST&#8221-.

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#1. PREDICTIONS

Predictions

http://www.midasoracle.org/predictions/

= our explainer on prediction markets + the best charts of prediction markets

Following the New Hampshire brouhaha, I believe that the way to go is to systematically associate (when time and space permit) a short probability explainer to any published chart of prediction market. You can see such an association at the top of our blog frontpage. I will do that in some blog posts, too, in the future.

Political charts from InTrade and NewsFutures are published there. Charts from more exchanges will be added there over the coming weeks, months, and years. Suggestions are welcomed.

Thanks to Michael Giberson and Emile Servan-Schreiber for some tiny input in establishing that brand-new page.

&#8212-

&#8212-

#2. BEST

Best

http://www.midasoracle.org/best/

= the best external weblinks on prediction markets + the best Midas Oracle posts on prediction markets

This file has been quite popular &#8212-see the web stats report, in the appendix. I will, of course, augment this file with many more pointers, in the coming weeks, months, and years. Suggestions are welcomed.

&#8212-

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#3. ARCHIVES

Archives

http://www.midasoracle.org/archives/

You can now search the archives of the Midas Oracle blog posts &#8212-by date, by category, by tag, by poster, etc. Bo Cowgill will now be able to dig the Midas Oracle archives to unearth all &#8220-the inaccuracies&#8221- that I have printed &#8220-over the years&#8221-. :-D Good luck for your quest, Bo.

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#4. LOOKING FORWARD

Forward

More pageviews for the blog.

More coverage of the prediction markets (as opposed to coverage of the prediction market industry) &#8212-on the other two blogs (Midas Oracle .NET and Midas Oracle .COM).

More academic paper reviews.

A sense of what could be prediction market journalism (pioneered by Justin Wolfers in the Wall Street Journal).

A discussion on the usefulness of a prediction market plugin for WordPress.

And, maybe, the building of an advisory board for Midas Oracle &#8212-if that makes sense and serves a purpose.

Step one towards our ultimate goal: WORLD DOMINATION. :-D

&#8212-

&#8212-

APPENDIX

Below are pageviews of the most popular Midas Oracle webpages, since September 2006. For the posts (as opposed to the pages), to get a more complete picture, you should add the number 1,050 (estimation) to the numbers below &#8212-to account for the feed subscribers (900) and the blog frontpage readers (150), who both also consumed the posts in question.

Please note that these stats are from Google Analytics. When assessing the popularity of Midas Oracle against other websites, do use the Google Analytics numbers, and not numbers from other web stats services. (I also have server stats, whose numbers are much more impressive, but they don&#8217-t count the same things.) Thanks.

Stats

Stats2

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

  • Our good doctor EJSS laughs at the “Web 2.0” concept on TechCrunch, but touts it as an essential part of the NewsFutures offerings on his website.
  • NewsFutures do *NOT* favor event derivative management by traders.
  • Who will win Super Bowl XLII? Patriots vs. Giants
  • NewsFutures presidential widget
  • Win Florida, win the nomination.
  • Barack Obama’s victory in South Carolina won’t stop the Clintons.
  • eTech 2008 — Google’s enterprise prediction markets

The answer to any anti-prediction market backlash is quality, impartial, exchange-independent, science-based, diligent, pro-PM blogging.

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No GravatarIs John Delaney the greatest psychic of all times (past, present, and future)?

Deep Throat is very impressed by how accurate the InTrade-TradeSports CEO&#8217-s 2005 prediction turned out to be. According to Deep Throat, the great Irish oracle &#8220-accurately predicted back in early 2005 in a PM conference in NY that someday the markets will make a horribly wrong prediction and that the [prediction market] industry will take a lot of s**t for it.&#8221-

Hummm&#8230-.

Deep Throat is easily impressed. What about the prediction below, then:

  • One of these days, a powerful hurricane will land in one of the southern states, and make billions of dollars in damage.

Vague and obvious predictions are of little help, here. An interesting thought to have, collectively, is how to prepare well in advance to counter such a backlash &#8212-as it is sure to happen again in the coming years. Due to the readers&#8217- new behavior (using the Web to get their info), the conversational aspect of the Web (comments, bloggers responding to their peers), and the velocity of the bloggers (tempests in tea cups spread over one or two days, and then the bloggers move on), the answer is quality, impartial, exchange-independent, science-based, diligent, pro-PM blogging.

You will note that InTrade-TradeSports, BetFair, NewsFutures, and the other PM firms, are completely absent from the dialogue between anti and pro PMs. The BetFair blog has not published anything about the New Hampshire fiasco, and the InTrade bulletin has only put in writing, on a post, the post-NH market-generated probabilities &#8212-without adding any bit of analysis. Totally pointless and useless corporate publications.

As for me, I have worked hard to put our group blog, Midas Oracle, on the blogging scene. I will further this endeavor and announce new initiatives in the future &#8212-if I am able to do so.

Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • NUCLEAR SCANDAL: HubDub allow their traders to bet on celebrities’ death.
  • APRIL FOOL’S DAY: This year, again, CNET makes fun of the wisdom of crowds.
  • Play-money prediction exchange HubDub is a phenomenal success.
  • BetFair Australia’s spin doctor tells all about their payments to the horse race industry.
  • Meet Jeffrey Ma (at right on the photo), the ProTrade co-founder, and whose gambling life is the basis of the upcoming movie, 21.

Midas Oracle = posting + commenting… on prediction markets

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No GravatarConversations

by Lonni Sue Johnson

Read the previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • Michael Gerber – The E-Myth Revisited
  • Changes to TradeFair prediction markets
  • Eric Zitzewitz, laughing all the way to the bank
  • Michael Bloomberg: I’m not running… but, beware, I am a King maker.
  • Meet the 3 Iowa Electronic Markets co-founders: George Neumann, Forrest Nelson and Robert Forsythe.
  • When Markets Beat The Polls – Scientific American Magazine
  • GLOBAL COOLING

That blog webmaster doesnt have the first clue about web publishing.

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  • The Top 6 Ways Not To Get Pulled Over
  • How to Handle Getting Pulled Over Without Losing Your Cool
  • Top Five Cop Tricks – How They Get You to Give Up Your Rights
  • Avoiding the Section 1001 Trap – Why You Always Need A Lawyer

Nowhere in those four excellent law articles can you spot the name of the smart author who penned them: STEVE &#8220-Mister Just&#8221- ROMAN.

The BetFair blog (Betting @ BetFair) and the InTrade &#8220-bulletin&#8221- suffer from the same flaw &#8212-and many others, alas.

On Midas Oracle, our blog authors are listed, counted, evaluated, and their damn name do appear in the signature line of their blog posts &#8212-including when the blog posts are viewed within a feed reader (like Google Reader or BlogLines). Plus, on Midas Oracle, copyright is retained by each author. And cross-posting (with a deep link to the original content) is accepted.

Can you think of another name to add in this list?

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Acknowledments

– Friedrich August von Hayek (an economist who introduced, among other things, the concept of the market as an information aggregation tool in The Use of Knowledge in Society, and the 1974 co-winner of the Nobel Prize in economics)-

– Professor Vernon Smith (an experimental economics pioneer, and, as such, the 2002 co-winner of the Nobel Prize in economics)-

– Professor Robin Hanson (one of the contemporary co-inventors of the prediction markets)-

– Doctor James Surowiecki (author of The Wisdom Of Crowds)-

– Professor Steve Levitt (co-author of Freakonomics)-

– Professor Tyler Cowen (co-author of Marginal Revolution and author of Discover Your Inner Economist)-

– Donald Luskin (author of The Conspiracy To Keep You Poor And Stupid)- [*]

– The W3C, Mozilla, Yahoo!, Google, Wikipedia, WordPress and Linux people (among others) for freeing our information-based society.

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[*] Don Luskin helped me with finding a good blog name, &#8220-Midas Oracle&#8221-. :-D