Tomb of Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings:
Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006: InTrade-TradeSports is toasted.
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Tag Archives: ntubbbb
After NETeller, Citadel is out of the US market.
The Guardian:
The Vancouver-based ESI Entertainment, a rival firm which operates the payment processor Citadel, confirmed yesterday that it too was withdrawing from the US with immediate effect.
This is from TradeSports:
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Former Blog Posts:
– NETeller people arrested. TradeSports people, next??
– Internet Gambling Crisis – AGAIN
– NETeller yesterday, TradeSports-InTrade tomorrow?
– Using NETeller for TradeSports-InTrade, no more
– Gambling Enabler Neteller Craps Out.
– NETeller alternatives
– Which will be the next major sportsbook to leave the US market? – REDUX
Which will be the next major sportsbook to leave the US market? – REDUX
TEN CEO John Delaney’-s arrogance didn’-t go unnoticed by the TradeSports-InTrade traders. How come his own betting exchange wasn’-t included in the gambling industry prediction market??
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Todd73NJ:
How come TradeSports isn’-t listed on there…- since the contract will be on Intrade, which will be a separate company shortly, I don’-t think listing TS would be a crazy idea. Would probably be the highest volume traded of all of them.
I’-d trade the TS contract…- And I only use one of those other books regularly which I know will be the last one to fall for sure…- So I really only have interest in TS and World Sports Exchange
Abacus:
They used the term “-sportsbook”- so they could leave TS off by claiming it is an “-exchange”- and not a “-sportsbook”-.
Guys, I’-m glad you put it up but it is meaningless unless you include your own company.
Do the right thing and change the contract.
Suggested modification:
Next major online entertainment company to withdraw from the US:
Betcris
B*d*g
Greek
Sportsbook.com
Tradesports
W*ex
None
BetFair Multiples??
BetFair Multiples – in the Racing Post, page 89 – Thursday, January 18, 2007
I would appreciate if a U.K.-based Midas Oracle reader informed me or sent me excerpts. Thanks. Will make up to you. I heard that it means that BetFair is going to become a bookmaker, but I can’-t believe my eyes.
Betfair previously only accepted single bets on match results forcing punters wishing to make multiple match bets – such as trebles and accumulators – to go to traditional firms like William Hill and Ladbrokes.
But now, in a radical move, the Hammersmith based company are ready to accept multiples. In a major shift in strategy, Betfair itself will act as the bookmaker offering odds taken from their person-to-person singles football markets.
The company claim they will invariably offer better odds than High Street rivals even allowing for five per cent commission. Steve High, Betfair’-s product manager, said: “-Our aim is to be the biggest online betting company.”-
(Thanks to Fabian John for the link.)
Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:
- Robin Hanson wants to rule the world —just as CEOs and heads of states do for a living.
- Predictify got funded… Great for those who will be hired… But is it a good thing, overall?
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb likens modern-day financial markets to medicine in the 1800s, when going to a hospital in London or Paris multiplied your risk of death by four times, he says. Similarly, quants increase risk by deploying flawed financial tools designed to reduce it, he argues.
- TradeSports-InTrade — Check Deposits
- BetFair Australia fought for free trade across Australian state boundaries… and won.
Discussion about applicability of prediction markets for long-term prediction!
For now, prediction markets are mostly used for short- or mid-term prognosis horizons.
The pay-off for the traders is contingent upon the real event. That means they have to wait until the actual event occurs, before they know what their prognosis is worth and what the pay-off for each contract is.
What about long-term events?
For long-term prediction, this doesn’t seem to be a practicable way. Waiting till 2020 when e.g. the real unemployment rate is published does not provide an incentive to trade shares for this.
But what could be a way to construe a reasonable pay-off function?
One possible approach by Prof. Spann at the University of Passau is to run two separate prediction markets concurrently. All information about prices, traders etc. of market A would not available for traders of market B and contrary.
The pay-off for Market A would be the final price of Market B and vice versa.
So it is possible to run an virtual market for e.g. 2 months predicting the outcome of an event in 2020.Another way is to let an expert(s) assess the event an use his (their) opinions as the pay-off function.
Furthermore the own end-price of the market could be the pay-off. But then manipulation is to be expected.
I’-m looking forward to discuss this challenge with you!
P.S. www.Ideosphere.com seems to be a prediction market for long term predictions, but they don’t provide a solution for the problem.
Midas Oracle is forbidden on the TradeSports-InTrade forum.
“-Brad”- and “-Caveat Bettor”-, among others, are allowed to pitch their site or blog on the TradeSports-InTrade forum. When I did the same in October 2006, my posting was immediately deleted. Something I said???
Note: CFM (the vortal on event derivatives, prediction markets and prediction exchanges) and the two Midas Oracle blogs (Midas Oracle .ORG and Midas Oracle .NET) contains hundreds, if not thousands, of outbounds links to TradeSports-InTrade.
My Question To Mike Linskvayer: Mike, is there a Web-based tool somewhere that would scan all the webpages of my site and blogs, and count how many outbound links to TradeSports-InTrade there are?
NETeller yesterday, TradeSports-InTrade tomorrow?
Via Betting Market at Delicious (which you may bookmark if you wish to get further links on the new internet Gambling crisis, later on this week):
– United States of America v. Stephen Eric Lawrence
– United States of America v. John David Legebvre
– Loosely related: Gary Kaplan (BetOnSports) – InterPol – (Frauds, Thefts) – [Note: From memory, Robin Hanson participated in a pro-gambling conference sponsored by BetOnSports, some years ago. Addendum: With Koleman Strumpf. The link.]
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– Does the U.S. government consider the offshore, real-money prediction exchanges (a.k.a. betting exchanges) as part of the “-internet gambling industry”- and will it enforce the Internet Gambling Prohibition and Enforcement Act (H.R. 4411) against TradeSports-InTrade?
– Do TEN CEO John Delaney and the TEN shareholders (venture capitalists and angel investors) have knowledge that they have been participating in a criminal activity in the United States?
1. Criminal laws exist in the United States that prohibit persons from promoting certain forms of gambling.
2. Criminal laws exist in the United States that prohibit the transmission of funds that are known to have been derived from criminal activity or are intended to promote criminal activity.
Internet Gambling Crisis – AGAIN
Business Week (mirror at Forbes):
FBI Assistant Director Mark J. Mershon said the multibillion-dollar online gambling industry was “-a colossal criminal enterprise masquerading as legitimate business.”-
Does the U.S. government put real-money prediction exchanges (e.g., TradeSports-InTrade) in the perimeter of the “-gambling industry”-? If yes, then TradeSports-InTrade is dead on arrival (D.O.A.). If not, as stated by TEN CEO John Delaney (who believes that they are after bookmakers and sportsbooks, only), then what we need is a statement from the U.S. government that it won’-t touch the offshore, real-money prediction exchanges.
In the absence of such an exoneration, is it rational to predict the death of TradeSports-InTrade? If the U.S. government goes after TEN’-s American shareholders (venture capitalists and angel investors), they will fly away like frightened pigeons —-if that’-s not done already (think “-re-organization”-). I may be wrong but I believe that TEN is not yet profitable —-especially after the killing of their financial prediction markets, following the CFTC fine.
All this is very sad for us who believe in real-money prediction markets.
The arrest of TEN CEO John Delaney on U.S. soil (in a phone-booth conference room, for instance) could be interesting in that it would generate a wave of supportive statements from a bunch of American economists —-including some of the IEM gang members (e.g., Ms. Berg). We could have a repetition of the DARPA’-s FutureMAP PAM effect —-a controversy on real-money prediction markets hitting the print Press, which, short-term, we would lose, but which, long term, would be beneficial to the whole industry. The economists yelling “-fire”- would attract the attention of the private decision makers reading the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, and the next step would be to turn these prospects into clients of prediction market software vendors.
What the hell is a predicted probability??
In response to my previous rant, I’-m told that:
#1. My criticism (expressed for the third time) about the bad usability of their big, rounded button has finally be digested.
#2. The “-home page”- they are referring to in their blog post is not the frontpage, but the home page for the Inkling play-money prediction markets. Ah. So I went there again, and I saw this:
Will Google’-s stock price hit $600 before Dec. 31, 2007?
current prediction
The predicted probability is 57.5%
Bad. Better: The current probability for the $600 outcome is 57.5% —-so, yes, Inkling is predicting that Google’-s stock price will hit the $600 mark before Dec. 31, 2007.
Integrating Book Orders and Market Makers
[Cross-posted from Pancrit.org.]
Dave Pennock gave a gentle introduction to the Market Scoring Rule invented by Robin Hanson. In the comments, Sid asked for an explanation of how to integrate the MSR with an order book. Dave asked me privately if I’-d be willing to tackle that, and this post is the result. Robin’-s short note on integrating an order book and a market maker covers a lot of territory very quickly. In Robin’-s defense, it was written to clarify some ideas in the midst of a conversation we were having at the time, and hasn’-t been cleaned up for publication. I’-ll expand on it here so it has a chance of making sense to others. The paper couches things in terms of the MSR, a particular AMM, but none of the implementation depends on which AMM is used.
There’-s a working example of the integration we’-re talking about in the code for Zocalo. The code that does this is currently in transition since I’-m adding support for multi-outcome markets. For the moment, I recommend reading the code for version 375, since the current code is more complex and possibly incomplete. You can either download the complete source code for release 2006.5 of the Zocalo Prediction Market, or browse the code directly using the SVN interface.
The paper starts by giving a very compressed introduction to the idea of a prediction market and market maker (hereafter AMM for Automated Market Maker). Unless you’-re very familiar with the details and the formalisms that Robin uses to describe them, you’-d be better off reading the original papers (Logarithmic Market Scoring Rules, Combinatorial Information Market Design) than trying to pick anything up from the first four paragraphs of the note.
The fourth paragraph slips into the idea of integrating an order book with the AMM he’-s talked about to that point. (”-If instead [the AMM price resulting from buying the entire quantity is higher than the user’s max marginal price], a portion […] could be traded with the market maker, leaving a book order for the remaining quantity”-). From that point, he talks about how to integrate the two markets.
If new orders get the advantage of any order price overlap
In book order systems, if orders arrive asynchronously, you will often see orders that “-overlap”-, i.e. orders to buy at a higher price than the best offer to sell, or orders to sell lower than the best offer to buy. The system has to have policy about what price to transact at in these cases. The system could tell each party that they got the price they requested, and pocket the difference- it could use the book order’-s price or the new offer’-s price- or it could split the difference in the interest of fairness. If any choice is made other than using the stated price of the order in the book, investors have an incentive to carefully submit bids a little at a time (aka “-structure”- their bids) so they won’-t pay more than they have to if new orders should arrive. Robin argued elsewhere (I can’-t find the reference at the moment) that you should just transact at the book order price so that people submitting market price orders don’-t waste their resources and yours on this optimization.
That choice also simplifies the calculation for accepting new offers. As Robin says, “-each book order […] imposes a constraint on the market maker price”-. The AMM should fulfill orders up to that limit, then let trade continue with the book order. This requires a loop, in which you buy from the AMM until you reach the limit imposed by the best order(s), then trade up to the book order’-s available quantity, then go back to the AMM until you reach the next book order. You can see the approach in Zocalo’-s method Market.buyFromBothBookAndMaker(…-). (The method starts at line 237.)
At every step,
- find the remaining quantity q of the new order
- find the price p available from the best existing order
- if the AMM’-s price is no better than the book order, trade up to q with the book
- otherwise trade with the AMM to the lesser of p or q
The loop stops either when the new order is fulfilled or the price limit specified by the new order is reached.
That’-s the simple version for a one-dimensional AMM. The multi-dimensional version arises if you implement the AMM as described in “-Combinatorial Information Market Design”-. There are two open source implementations of this approach available for reading by hard-core hackers. Robin built an implementation in Lisp, and I wrote a version in E. Neither is more than a demonstration of how the market engine works, since no serious user interface was written for either one.
Rather than attempt to explain how the approach translates to the multi-dimensional case now, I’-d prefer to wait until after I write an explanation of the n-dimensional combination market, and that depends on a gentle introduction to conditional and combinatorial betting which I haven’-t written yet. Having someone ask about Robin’-s note raises my priority for writing these prerequisites.
Other Articles in this series
- PM intro: basic formats (2005-12-30)
- PMs with Open-ended Prices (2006-01-05)
- Looking at Both Sides (2006-04-17)
- Book and Market Maker (2006-04-28)
- Liquidity in N-Way claims (2006-07-19)
- Continuous Outcomes using Bands and Ladders (2006-09-20)