The mainstream media continue to show interest for Jason Ruspini’-s tax futures markets.
Previously: Video.
Hedge your taxes -and forecast them too.
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Monthly Archives: February 2008
Alpha Thesis
…- Is The Blog Of The Day.
Good prediction market journalism.
Best wishes for your blog, Ashish Singal.
Come visit us on Midas Oracle whenever you want.
Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:
- Red Herring’s list of the top 100 North-American high-tech startups includes Inkling Markets —but not NewsFutures, Consensus Point, or Xpree.
- Professor Koleman Strumpf explains the prediction markets to the countryland people.
- Professor Koleman Strumpf tells CNN that a prediction market, by essence, can’t predict an upset.
- Time magazine interview the 2 BetFair-Tradefair co-founders, and not a single time do they pronounce the magic words, “prediction markets”.
- One Deep Throat told me that this VC firm might have been connected with the Irish prediction exchange, at inception.
- BetFair Rapid = BetFair’s standalone, local, PC-based, order-entry software for prediction markets
- Michael Moore tells the Democratic people to go Barack Obama in Pennsylvania (a two-tier state), but the polls and the prediction markets tell us that that won’t do the trick.
Meet Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.
Lloyd Grove: I ran into Nick Denton [the owner of Gawker Media, parent company of the Silicon Valley blog ValleyWag.com] last night. What do you think of him?
Michael Arrington: I think he’-s a total dick.
Lloyd Grove: Would you care to elaborate?
Michael Arrington: I think he’-s amoral. I don’-t think he has any sense of right and wrong, and he’-ll do anything he can to make money and have a successful blog. So I just don’-t associate with him.
Lloyd Grove: I have to say, when he invited me to be his friend on Facebook, I had to think about it a long time. Because here in New York, when I had a gossip column at the New York Daily News, Gawker particularly attempted to make my life less pleasant than it ought to have been.
Michael Arrington: Yeah, I know what that’-s all about. By the way, Valleywag competes with TechCrunch on some stories, and it doesn’-t matter. If they get a tip or think something’-s funny, they’-ll write it about me. And it’-s not just me, they do it to everyone. But I just try to ignore it.
Lloyd Grove: Uh huh. Tell me, obviously the big challenge for traditional print journalism organizations like the Washington Post or Time magazine or New York magazine, and even Conde Nast Portfolio, is to figure out how to monetize the internet and make their businesses viable on the internet. Do people in those businesses ever consult you since you seem to have a very successful journalistic operation?
Michael Arrington: Not so much. I mean, we’-re able to monetize because we have a very high-end audience and it’-s very niche and very specific. We’-re lucky, but it’-s not magic. If you can get an audience like ours, it’-s pretty easy to generate revenue.
Lloyd Grove: How do you describe your audience to advertisers?
Michael Arrington: You know, they’-re early adopters. They’-re people that want to try new products. A significant portion of my audience, for instance, would’-ve bought the Kindle when Amazon released it last year, immediately. And they’-re a lot of entrepreneurs, so a lot of them need service providers, they need designers, they need accountants, and then they need to buy software. So Microsoft, Adobe, and others are always advertising on the site as well. So that’-s it, and sometimes, you have other things as well, but it’-s a high-end high-income sort of audience. We did a survey a while back, and the average was like $100,000 a year.
Lloyd Grove: You’-re only two years old, right?
Michael Arrington: This is going to be our third year.
TechCrunch
CrunchNotes
More Info
Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:
- Red Herring’s list of the top 100 North-American high-tech startups includes Inkling Markets —but not NewsFutures, Consensus Point, or Xpree.
- Professor Koleman Strumpf explains the prediction markets to the countryland people.
- Professor Koleman Strumpf tells CNN that a prediction market, by essence, can’t predict an upset.
- Time magazine interview the 2 BetFair-Tradefair co-founders, and not a single time do they pronounce the magic words, “prediction markets”.
- One Deep Throat told me that this VC firm might have been connected with the Irish prediction exchange, at inception.
- BetFair Rapid = BetFair’s standalone, local, PC-based, order-entry software for prediction markets
- Michael Moore tells the Democratic people to go Barack Obama in Pennsylvania (a two-tier state), but the polls and the prediction markets tell us that that won’t do the trick.
Changes to Midas Oracle
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) - Anyone can register himself/herself to become a member. A math test will deter spammers.
- The last part of some of my posts will be seen only by registered members —-at times. You’-ll be told to login or register to see the full post.
- I will send out an e-mail newsletter to the registered members —-at times. This will be performed directly from the Midas Oracle system. Your e-mail addresses won’-t be shared with an external service.
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Read the previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:
- TechCrunch is 221 times bigger than Midas Oracle.
- Earthquake measuring 9.0 or more on Richter scale to occur anywhere on or before December 31, 2008
- Why Midas Oracle (and not TV news shows or print newspapers) will dominate the future.
- The Six Degrees Of Separation
- Alpha Thesis
- Meet Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.
- Hedge your taxes –and forecast them too.
Getting from Collective Intelligence to Collective Action
I really enjoyed attending the Collective Intelligence FOO Camp, sponsored by Google and O’-Reilly Media, last weekend. I’-d been expecting a sort of geek slumber party, and had looked forward to rolling out my awesome Darth Vader impersonation. I was all set to cut loose with a growling, “-I’-m your father, Luke.”- It didn’-t quite come to that, but I still had a blast, meeting lots of smart, informed, articulate, creative, and successful people. Friendly people, too.
I described how to establish the legality of real money, open-access prediction markets under U.S. law. I called my presentation, Getting from Collective Intelligence to Collective Action [PPT file]. In very brief, I proposed this algorithm:
- Set up an enterprise prediction market, make playing it a condition of continued employment, and offer valuable prizes to the best predictors.
- Set up a limited access prediction market, hire a number of independent contractors researchers to play it, pay them a relatively low salary for doing so, and offer valuable prizes to the best predictors.
- Set up an open-access prediction market but require anyone playing it to go through a click-wrap license that creates the sort of independent researcher relationship described at step 2, above.
When and if standing for declaratory judgment obtains, a litigation team should bring suit seeking to establish the legality of the prediction market under U.S. law. The market should be run by a worthy institution and deal only in claims likely to generate large positive externalities. Google.org, for example, might set up a market in earthquake claims and ask for a court’-s blessing.
That strategy would stand a fair chance–-a 75% chance, I’-d say–-of establishing the legality of a great many in-house and (effectively) public prediction markets under U.S. law. The strategy would not impose great costs or risks, though it would take some careful planning and execution, and would almost certainly generate large private and public goods. It might even save lives- we could really use a reliable early-warning system for major earthquakes.
This legalization program would most directly benefit subsidized markets- it would not plainly establish the legality of markets where traders could invest their own funds or hedge against off-market risks. I’-m still working out a legal hack for that step. It will be an easier step to take, however, if we’-ve already made it as far as establishing the legality of open-access, real money prediction markets under U.S. law.
We should still pursue other routes to establishing the legality of prediction markets under U.S. law, of course. It already helps that so many U.S. residents evidently make and lose money on Ireland-based InTrade. That at least goes to show that prediction markets hurt nobody. Getting the CFTC to issue safe-harbor regulations would help, too. All of those routes to public, real money prediction markets in the U.S. merit exploration. Any of them might offer a shortcut to a better, freer future.
[Posted at Agoraphilia, The Technology Liberation Front, and Midas Oracle.]
Donald Luskin outputs a bad explainer on prediction markets.
Firstly, I’-d like to say that I respect Donald Luskin as a Wall Street professional and as a libertarian blogger. But I think that his explainer is too simplistic.
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Not a single word on the concept of probabilistic prediction:
The financial incentive to get it right, and the ability to draw on bettors from around the world —- anyone who might have any information on whatever proposition is being bet on —- is what gives these markets their uncanny predictive power.
Mixing prediction markets (a reality) with decision markets (a utopia):
Economics professor Robin Hanson, who has studied prediction markets extensively, told me he envisions a “-futarchy”- —- government by futures contracts traded in a prediction market.
Claiming that these information aggregation mechanisms (the prediction markets) will supplant the advanced indicators which they feed on:
Today prediction markets are threatening to replace political polling —- they’-re certainly doing a better job. Tomorrow, who knows? Prediction markets might replace politics itself.
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My readers will prefer the Midas Oracle explainer on prediction markets.
Michael Gerber – The E-Myth Revisited
Right-click on his picture, open the link in another browser tab, and read his interesting interview.
Read the previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:
- TechCrunch is 221 times bigger than Midas Oracle.
- Earthquake measuring 9.0 or more on Richter scale to occur anywhere on or before December 31, 2008
- Why Midas Oracle (and not TV news shows or print newspapers) will dominate the future.
- The Six Degrees Of Separation
- Alpha Thesis
- Meet Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.
- Hedge your taxes –and forecast them too.
BetFair on Nine OClock News 2007-10-10
YouTube video
Read the previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:
- TechCrunch is 221 times bigger than Midas Oracle.
- Earthquake measuring 9.0 or more on Richter scale to occur anywhere on or before December 31, 2008
- Why Midas Oracle (and not TV news shows or print newspapers) will dominate the future.
- The Six Degrees Of Separation
- Alpha Thesis
- Meet Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.
- Hedge your taxes –and forecast them too.
Meet the 3 Iowa Electronic Markets co-founders: George Neumann, Forrest Nelson and Robert Forsythe.
- George R. Neumann
- Forrest Nelson
- Robert Forsythe
- IEM
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Photo Credit: Doug Benton – FishEye – for Scientific American magazine – Abstract
When Markets Beat The Polls – Scientific American Magazine
Via Mat Fogarty of Xpree (an innovative firm providing software for enterprise prediction markets), the Scientific American magazine on prediction markets –-”-When Markets Beat the Polls”-.
Ask me by e-mail to get a copy of the PDF file.
Abstract:
When Markets Beat the Polls– March 2008- Scientific American Magazine- by Gary Stix- 8 Page(s)
In late March 1988 three economists from the University of Iowa were nursing beers at a local hangout in Iowa City, when conversation turned to the news of the day. Jesse Jackson had captured 55 percent of the votes in the Michigan Democratic caucuses, an outcome that the polls had failed to intimate. The ensuing grumbling about the unreliability of polls sparked the germ of an idea. At the time, experimental economics–-in which economic theory is tested by observing the behavior of groups, usually in a classroom setting–-had just come into vogue, which prompted the three drinking partners to deliberate about whether a market might do better than the polls.
A market in political candidates would serve as a novel way to test an economic theory asserting that all information about a security is reflected in its price. For a stock or other financial security, the price summarizes, among other things, what traders know about the factors influencing whether a company will achieve its profit goals in the coming quarter or whether sales may plummet. Instead of recruiting students to imitate buyers or sellers of goods and services, as in other economics experiments, participants in this election market would trade contracts that would provide payoffs depending on what percentage of the vote George H. W. Bush, Michael Dukakis or other candidates received.
Robin Hanson had more.
