Midas Oracle .ORG

Chris F. Masse March 7th, 2008

Here’s the vertical menu of the BetFair blog. Scroll down until you see “Politics”, and “Prediction Markets”.

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Here’s their section on politics:

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Here’s their section on finance:

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My thoughts:

1. Their “about” page still does not list the names of their editor(s) and publisher(s). It would give them credibility.
2. My understanding is that their blog is run by their PR department. That’s a problem. By essence, it means that readers will trust it less than the independent publications out there. Never in the history of the publishing business did a P.R. department of a commercial company managed to run a popular, credible publication —offline or online. It can’t be. Spin doctors want to control information, while journalists want to free it. It’s 2 different worlds, totally incompatible. It’ll never work.
3. They are mixing news articles written by outside journalists or bloggers with P.R. stuff written by people working at BetFair or TradeFair. Again, it’s not a good idea if you want to be trusted by the readers. The two kinds of postings should be published on 2 different blogs —the news blog should be kept completely separate from the corporate blog.
4. A close look at many of their entries show that the BetFair blog is not a quality publication. Their news stories mostly replicate, with less talent, what you can read elsewhere on the Web or in newspapers. There is no innovation.
5. Their postings consist entirely of texts —with very few charts, and almost no internal/external weblinks.
6. I find the BetFair blog very UK centric.
7. Sometimes, they would post for the search engine spiders, and not for the readers. The result is really bizarre, and leaves a funny taste in the mouth.
8. Their blog suffers from many technical problems. The most annoying issue is that their site feed does not reflect entirely their content. I’m a subscriber of their feed within Google Reader. I searched for “Robb”, “politics”, “Clinton”, and “TradeFair”, and I was not able to get the items related to the posts I saw on their website. They should fix this issue ASAP. (I blogged about this technical issue, some weeks ago. To no avail.)
9. Last time I reviewed the BetFair blog, I yelled against the fact that their main writer on prediction markets went with an anonymous byline, “The Predictor” (whose only qualification was that he has “long hair” and that he “eats cheese”). They backpedaled, and now their new prediction market writer goes with the “Mike Robb” byline. It’s much better. (Michael Robb is one of the BetFair employees working at their P.R. department, if I’m correct. His author profile page says he is their “resident political expert”. “Resident” means that he is a BetFair employee, in HammerSmith, as I take it. As whether he is really a “political expert”, as billed, I’ll leave it to you.)
10. From what I know, Michael Robb seems to be a decent and smart ‘chap’ (as they say in England). I wish him good luck. (Here’s his latest output.)
11. They restrict their prediction market approach to politics —that’s a huge mistake, which shows their total misunderstanding of the prediction market approach. They should apply it to sports, too.
12. They are completely clueless as to what form should take prediction market journalism. That’s grave. I’ll blog about that, later on. It’s a long story of prediction market mechanics, usage, intended audience, and strategy. I need to explain all this on an independent blog post, in the near future.
13. Professor Leighton Vaughan-Williams is billed as the “BetFair prof”. It’s a bad idea. It debases Academia. Scholars are paid to develop and propagate our global civilization’s knowledge, not to act as servile P.R. agents for commercial companies. Furthermore, a close look at his prediction market explainer shows that Leighton Vaughan-Williams lacks understanding of the concept of probability as applied to the market-generated predictions. And my readers remember that Leighton Vaughan-Williams has stubbornly refused to disclose the origin of the trading data he used to tout BetFair’s alleged extraordinary predictive power. (The suspicion is that he used InTrade’s data.) All the prediction market scientists I know (Justin Wolfers, Eric Ziztwitz, Robin Hanson, Koleman Stumpf, Paul Tetlock, David Pennock, Lance Fortnow, etc.) do disclose information easily. All this indicates to me that Leighton Vaughan-Williams is not to be trusted. (And scroll down to see the comment on his dubious post, and you’ll see that my negative opinion is shared by at least one informed BetFair trader.)
    
14. Finally, I was disagreeably surprised to see the presence of TradeFair in this BetFair blog. TradeFair was billed as independent from BetFair. If they are really independent, then they should publish on the TradeFair blog —not on the BetFair blog. Makes no sense at all. Makes the TradeFair independence looks like a P.R. trick at launch, as opposed to a reality. The P.R. department is what is worse at BetFair. The BetFair P.R. agents are arrogant ignorants, who don’t understand prediction markets, who don’t comprehend academic papers on prediction markets, who don’t listen, who don’t connect, who publish low-quality outputs that show how deep is their misunderstanding of the prediction markets, and hence, who generate bad publicity for BetFair in the prediction market circles (where InTrade is king). Yet, David Jack decided to put TradeFair in their incompetent hands. Immense error. And when you read each of their 3 binaries explainers, you realize that they are just typical (and mediocre) P.R. pieces, which could have well be published on the TradeFair trading site, in the “help” or “faq” section.

Even though InTrade-TradeSports and BetFair-TradeFair are not directly competitors, any web-literate internationalist interested in prediction markets can compare these 2 prediction exchanges and see almost instantly that the Irish are perfectly Americanized (with the caveat that they lack ethics, alas), whereas the HammerSmith people (in spite of their IT prowess) are just monkeying around with the grace of fatty toads. America hosts the best researchers and analysts in the field of prediction markets. America (not England) has produced the prediction market science (since the end of the nineties). BetFair-TradeFair should cross the Atlantic and get closer to this American bouillon de culture.

BetFair-TradeFair is the world’s #1 prediction exchange, and I value the fact that they decided to be ethical and legal (which contrasts with the pirates of InTrade-TradeSports). However, nobody in HammerSmith gets the prediction market approach (their attempts are superficial), and the BetFair P.R. agents have elevated mediocrity as a performing art. BetFair-TradeFair will have to change in the coming years —otherwise InTrade-TradeSports will remain the king of the prediction markets, forever.

Tags: BetFair, BetFair blog, event derivative markets, event derivatives, InTrade, Michael Robb, Mike Robb, prediction exchanges, prediction market approach, prediction market journalism, prediction markets, TradeFair, TradeSports

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