It’s sunday today, so I guess applying for a job at McDonald’s is out of the question. Perhaps we could try and revive the prediction market industry ?
For those who are against gambling/sports markets I have a deal to offer. The Australian model, meaning no in-running betting. That should take care of the dark side of betting to a large degree. Your fears, I have to admit it, are justified. In-running sports gambling, what it essentially does is give the punter an opportunity to fleece his opponent. Before you know it, most people will tolerate this kind of behaviour and you’re stuck with a rip-off society, the mentality we can witness today in the UK. This is not America.
I’ll admit it, but you have to do something for me. Rid yourselves of your biased beliefs that gambling is bad. It’s not. Consumer protection and betting integrity are key, and that’s where our focus should be. And it sure looks like you need the jobs.

…so it is unclear how to interpret…
Hypothesis stated. Hypothesis confirmed (by me). No need to trouble your mind with contaminated data and an inborn urge to try and make sense of the world we live in.

However, our inability to interpret unbalanced prices or markets doesn’t mean there is no value in them. On the contrary, it will act as a warning sign (nothing more). People will still trade these markets, but they have been warned.
There’s a third possibility btw - the crowd could have misinterpreted the rules on a specific market causing said market to go off-balance when one or a few traders decide to cash in. There could be other reasons too, but the signal remains the same and is still a valid one - “Trader beware, there could be something funny about this market”. If that’s how we’re going to regulate these markets and provide protection for the consumer, I will settle for it.

I’m not sure what it is you want to test, since you don’t have to force people to look at the information we are talking about. It should be available though, for those traders who want some protection against insider trading and market manipulation. We first need to convince the operator, or better yet the regulators, of the value of this information and the value in general of being transparent in the market place. Then we need to be smart and chose a sensible formula/metric.

Usually markets will be balanced, meaning that there are about as many traders laying as backing (a relatively small amount of money). On rare occasions though you’ll find one person laying or backing huge amounts of money, taking the market off-balance, which could be represented by a number like 4% or 96% when the ideal market would give us 50%. People don’t have to look at that information. That goes especially for people who want to allow the insiders to trade freely on these markets. Let THEM be fleeced.

It should be noted we now have at least three sources of information which will help the trader.
- An indication whether markets are on- or off-balance (your idea) to provide protection.
- Provide feedback to customers on traders’ track record (recently discussed) for more accurate markets.
- Something to do with destination invariant funds and liability (Adonis’ idea) to boost betting integrity which I’m sure he will get back to, some day.

This points out to me the importance of transparency in the market place, which will benefit all parties involved, except the cheats. That’s our goal, isn’t it ?