Chris, you aren’t clear why you think Inkling’s “Predict the date” is a better design than my use of Inkling’s multi-outcome structure. You hint it has something to do with liquidity. I need more hints. I don’t get it.

I do see that all the trading gets focused as buy or sell of a single contract rather than spread out across, in this particular example, nine contracts.

But my approach allows traders to express both a point estimate and a spread (a trader can buy both “two months” and “three months” and “four months” if he feels that the strike will last more than one but less than five months, without a strong feeling about when during that middle three months things will end).

In the predict a date approach, if the current prediction is in the middle of the third month (our trader’s average expected value), the trader can’t trade.

I am merely asserting some advantages, but don’t think anyone has researched the relative performance of the two designs (except maybe internally at Inkling. Anyone at Inkling want to speak up?).