Daily Archives: September 15, 2007

How can BetFair, the worlds market leader, produce such a piece of ****?

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Betting @ BetFair – The Official BetFair News Site

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&#8230- is a piece of ****.

#1. The brand name of this sub-site is crappy.

#2. The organization of the content is crappy.

#3. The content is crappy.

#4. Everything in it is totally crappy.

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My meta thoughts:

  1. The non-media, commercial companies cannot produce interesting journalistic content &#8212-unless they partner or buy out a media.
  2. Most people don&#8217-t have what it takes to be a good journalist. The blogging revolution has opened the door to many wannabe journalists, which is good&#8230- but still&#8230- only a small percentage of all the bloggers are good journalists. A good journalist is fundamentally a bastard. He/she would kill his/her mother to get the scoop, to find the right headline, to grab attention, and to advance his/her ideological hidden agenda. [*] That&#8217-s a very different mindset than executives and managers have. Journalists are a special species.
  3. As of today, it is inconceivable to publish on the Web and not to abide by the conventions and standards established by the other publishers. In other words, if you publish a group blog, it should resemble in its layout to the other group blogs &#8212-because that&#8217-s what your readers are accustomed to. Most of your readers spend most of their time elsewhere on the Web, are shaped by that experience, and then impose the conventions and standards to your website.

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[*] For instance, Mike Smithson&#8217-s hidden agenda is dual: number one, political betting has a social utility (forecasting), and, number two, the Liberal Democrats (that&#8217-s the third party in the U.K.) are good for Britain.

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Note: I was admonished by Niall O&#8217-Connor, yesterday, for using a &#8217-special&#8217- image that conveyed perfectly what I thought about this BetFair sub-site. :-D I suppressed the shocking image, to make up with the Irish betting man. He was right that it attracted attention- that blog post was the most downloaded, yesterday. :-D Rock around the bunker… Rock around, rock around… Rock around the bunker… Rock around, rock around… Rock around the bunker… Rock around, rock around…

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:

  • Are David Pennock’s search engine prediction markets the worst marketing disaster since the New Coke?
  • Midas Oracle is incontestably [*] the best vertical portal to prediction markets.
  • Comment spam paid by Emile Servan-Schreiber of NewsFutures-Bet2Give
  • BetFair Games needs a Swedish provider to develop its gambling offerings.
  • When Markets Beat the Polls – Scientific American Magazine
  • Robin Hanson has some fanboy in India. Great. Tiny caveat: The parroting Indian writer does not acknowledge Robin Hanson by name.
  • Molecular Nanotechnology

Risk that can be measured Vs. Uncertainty that cannot be measured

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The Freakonomics guys (on nuclear energy):

[…] The answer may lie in a 1916 doctoral dissertation by the legendary economist Frank Knight. He made a distinction between two key factors in decision making: risk and uncertainty. The cardinal difference, Knight declared, is that risk — however great — can be measured, whereas uncertainty cannot.

How do people weigh risk versus uncertainty? Consider a famous experiment that illustrates what is known as the Ellsberg Paradox. There are two urns. The first urn, you are told, contains 50 red balls and 50 black balls. The second one also contains 100 red and black balls, but the number of each color is unknown. If your task is to pick a red ball out of either urn, which urn do you choose? Most people pick the first urn, which suggests that they prefer a measurable risk to an immeasurable uncertainty. (This condition is known to economists as ambiguity aversion.) Could it be that nuclear energy, risks and all, is now seen as preferable to the uncertainties of global warming? […]

Previous: The Meaning of Probability, Class Probability, Case Probability, Betting, and Gambling

Extracting Market Predictions from Financial Data: Is the Surge Working?

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At Economist&#8217-s View, Mark Thoma draws attention to a recent paper that uses financial markets data to infer a market prediction of the likely effectiveness of the U.S. government&#8217-s &#8216-Surge&#8217- strategy in Iraq.

In &#8220-Is The &#8216-Surge&#8217- Working? Some New Facts&#8220-, MIT&#8217-s Michael Greenstone writes:

This paper shows how data from world financial markets can be used to shed light on the central question of whether the Surge has increased or diminished the prospect of today&#8217-s Iraq surviving into the future. In particular, I examine the price of Iraqi state bonds, which the Iraqi government is currently servicing, on world financial markets. After the Surge, there is a sharp decline in the price of those bonds, relative to alternative bonds. The decline signaled a 40% increase in the market&#8217-s expectation that Iraq will default. This finding suggests that to date the Surge is failing to pave the way toward a stable Iraq and may in fact be undermining it.

(HT to Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution.)