When Alex Kirtland of Usable Markets Goes Bad

Posted on April 2, 2007 by Chris F. Masse

… is when he labels “prediction markets” some things that have nothing to do with them.

About Chris F. Masse

Founder and President of Midas Oracle
This entry was posted in Forecasting (Science & Practice) and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.

3 Responses to When Alex Kirtland of Usable Markets Goes Bad

  1. Jason Ruspini says:
    April 2, 2007 at 5:58 PM

    Alex is spot-on in pointing out the dubious value of such forecasting games. While at some point one of these might produce a nice result in terms of aggregating opinion or identifying experts (especially the latter), for now play money games that try to duplicate or compete against established real money markets seem relatively uninteresting.

    Don’t the S&P 500/Wilshire 5000 etc already approach the average opinion? Again, these games are more about selecting “crowds” of experts, which is difficult given their play-money risk-seeking limitations.

  2. Jason Ruspini says:
    April 2, 2007 at 6:08 PM

    If one of these sites became established and reasonably good however, it would be interesting to compare its picks to banking analysts who are subject to the opposite risk bias of herding.

Leave a Reply