Monthly Archives: January 2010

The Internal Revenue Service is examining whether equity swaps help banks avoid taxes by masking who really owns the shares underlying the instruments.

“Federal authorities are scrutinizing certain financial derivatives that may enable Wall Street banks to avoid collecting billions of dollars in withholding taxes on stock dividends.”

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iPredict’s first conditional prediction markets

Note to our good friend Eric Crampton: – They are event derivatives, not “stocks”. I REQUEST A KIWI CORRECTION.

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ROBIN HANSON, WE DON’T GIVE THE FIRST FIG ABOUT YOUR DEBATE WITH THAT MENCIUS MOLDBUG.

WE WANT YOU TO DEBATE PAUL HEWITT. CAPITO?

Posted in Analysis (Meta), Exchanges & Markets | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Bill Gates now uses Twitter. — Paul Hewitt and David Pennock should use it too.

http://twitter.com/billgates http://twitter.com/midasoracle http://torontopm.wordpress.com/ http://blog.oddhead.com/

Posted in Miscellaneous | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Republican Scott Brown has become the Senator-elect from Massachusetts.

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InTrade servers were down on Mass. election night.

- “Unbelievable.” – “this is terrible” – “Absolutely pathetic Intrade.” Were some reactions by the event derivative traders.

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Massachusetts special election: Nate Silver knowns nothing. —REDUX

Nate Silver: There are many assumptions in this model which may not be valid []. Although I believe that these are generally a fairly well-balanced set of assumptions relative to the universe of possible assumptions (i.e. alternate sets of assumptions … Continue reading

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Can a conditional prediction market play chess?

The Hanson–Moldbug debate

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Massachusetts special election: Nate Silver knowns nothing.

6 scenarios United States Senate special election in Massachusetts, 2010

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You can’t have accumulator bets on the weather of neighboring regions…

… because “if it snows in one city, it’s likely to snow in another city.” In other words, these weren’t independent events. Via Barry Ritholtz (author of Bailout Nation)

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