Just thought this might interest some of you:

• Total volume in 2004 Democratic nomination markets: $5.2 million (data is taken from a talk I gave in San Diego)
• Volume in 2008 Dem and GOP nomination markets (with 7 months to go before the primaries start): $24 million

Update:

• CFM asks below whether the higher cumulative volumes on the 2008 contracts just reflect lots of trading in 2005 and early 2006.  I didn&#8217-t have an answer at the time, but if one recalculates the cumulative volume in the nomination markets as of today (10/24/07), it is $30.2 million, up about $6 million from early July.
• So more volume in the last 3.5 months than in the entire history of the 2004 markets.  Of course, there are two nomination fights this time around, but there are also still months to go before the primaries.
• This, together with the fact that there are many more political markets on Intrade competing for liquidity, suggests that InTrade&#8217-s politics markets are alive and well.

This article was originally written for the simExchange community to inform them that there will be no weekly IPOs for new game stocks this week.

There will be no stock IPOs on the simExchange for the week of July 9. Part of the reason is to shift trading activity to the futures contracts. As you may have noticed, the simExchange has been emphasizing the futures contracts lately with redesigns to the site.

The reason we have been putting more attention on the futures contracts is that after collaborating with the NPD Group, people in the video game industry, and those who cover it on Wall Street, we have learned that short-term unit sales data is much more relevant to the video game industry. Lifetime global sales are hard to judge and not as informative to the industry because it does not detail when the sales will occur (within a publisher&#8217-s fiscal quarter) and at what price the games will be sold (to forecast revenue). The NPD Group has been very kind to provide us unit sales data to settle our futures contracts to make short-term forecasts possible for the US market.

In the future, we will be using stocks to better judge which games we want to list as futures each month to concentrate trading and provide more accurate forecasts.

This article is cross posted from No IPOs for the week of July 9 on The simExchange Official Blog.