Yearly Archives: 2009

250 members of the LinkedIn group on prediction markets

Posted on by
Reply

No Gravatar

250

–

1. How To Join Us

  • From within LinkedIn, FaceBook, or Google Reader / Google Mail, send me (Chris Masse) an invite and I&#8217-ll accept it.
  • You are also invited to join the Prediction Markets group at LinkedIn. We accept everybody (traders, analysts, researchers, consultants, exchange managers, bloggers, etc.).
  • [As for joining Midas Oracle as a commenter or poster, see this other webpage.]
  • I can introduce you to another member of our business network. Just ask me (Chris Masse), and I&#8217-ll do.

–

2. LinkedIn Network

–

For your information, here is the listing of the co-managers of the Prediction Markets group at LinkedIn:

  • Jed Christiansen of Mercury
  • Tony Clare of BetFair
  • John Delaney of InTrade
  • Nigel Eccles of HubDub
  • Chris Hibbert of Zocalo
  • Chris Masse of Midas Oracle
  • David Pennock of Yahoo! Research
  • Michael Robb of BetFair
  • Emile Servan-Schreiber of NewsFutures
  • Adam Siegel of Inkling Markets

–

– The ownership of the group could be transferred to the yet-to-be-created &#8220-Prediction Market Institute&#8221-, at one time in the distant future.

–

Once you have joined our Prediction Markets group at LinkedIn, here&#8217-s how to make its logo visible on your profile.

–

–

– After you have joined our Prediction Markets group at LinkedIn, please make its logo visible on your profile. (In your listing of groups you belong to, you should read, near each one, &#8220-change visibility&#8221-. Click on that.)

– You are also invited to join Chris Masse&#8217-s network at LinkedIn.

–

Our Prediction Market People – (from the two networks listed just above)

– Bernd Ankenbrand (Gexid Manager)

– Paul Architzel (Counsel at Alston &amp- Bird)

– Maurice Balick (NewsFutures CTO)

– Pierluigi Buccioli (Entrepreneur and Betting Exchange Trader- Owner of Bookmakers Review)

– Jason Carver (Entrepreneur and Engineer)

– Yiling Chen (Professor at Harvard University)

– Jed Christiansen (Prediction Market Consultant)

– Tony Clare (Head of Strategic Initiatives at Betfair)

– Norris Clark (Vice-President of Sales at NewsFutures)

– Alexander Costakis (Managing Director of Hollywood Stock Exchange)

– Tyler Cowen (Economics Professor at George Mason University)

– Bo Cowgill (Quantitative Marketing Manager at Google)

– Eric Crampton (Senior Lecturer at University of Canterbury)

– Noam Danon (Qmarkets CEO and Founder)

– Pedro Da Cunha (Exago Markets CEO)

– John Delaney (InTrade CEO)

– Juan Manuel Ducler (Founder, BestChartsOnline.com / Trader &amp- Financial Consultant)

– Nigel Eccles (HudDub CEO)

– Leslie Fine (VP of Market Design at Xpree)

– Matthew Fogarty (Prediction Market Consultant – Xpree CEO and Founder)

– Lance Fortnow (Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University)

– Nick Garner (SEO / PPC / Search Manager at BetFair)

– Cedric Gaspoz (Research and Teaching Assistant at University of Lausanne)

– Michael Giberson (Energy Economist at Texas Tech University)

– Sean Glass (Founder, Chairman, Chief Strategy Officer at Pikum Holdings)

– Andrew Goldberg (Intern at Media Law Resource Center)

– Robin Hanson (Professor of Economics at George Mason University)

– Chris Hibbert (Software Architect, Project Lead at Zocalo)

– Donna Hoffman (Professor and Co-Director, Sloan Center for Internet Retailing)

– Panagiotis Ipeirotis (Assistant Professor at New York University)

– Max Keiser (Entrepreneur, Journalist, Co-Founder of the Hollywood Stock Exchange)

– Alex Kirtland (User Experience Consultant)

– Ken Kittlitz (Software Architect, Foresight Exchange, Consensus Point)

– Greg Knaddison (Developer and Sys Admin for PingVision)

– Nathan Kontny (Inkling Markets CTO)

– Kriss Monaco (Director of New Product Development at International Securities Exchange)

– Dean LeBaron (Independent Investment Management Professional)

– Heidi Levin (Director of Business Development at Inkling Markets)

– Mike Linksvayer (Vice-President of Creative Commons)

– Rory Mackay (PredictionsMarkets.com Co-Founder and Owner)

– Chris. F. Masse (Founder and President of Midas Oracle)

– Tracy Mullen (Penn State Professor of Information Technology)

– Jesper Muller-Krogstrup (Managing Director of Nosco)

– Sean Park (Founding Partner at Sixth Paradigm)

– David Pennock (Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo!)

– Daniel Reeves (Yahoo! Research Scientist)

– Michael Robb (Communications &amp- PR Executive at BetFair)

– Steve Roman (Financial Analyst at FXCM)

– Mark Rose (Ex-HedgeStreet Director of Product Development)

– Jason Ruspini (Financial Research Analyst, Vice President at Conquest Capital Group)

– Mike Sankowski (Product Development and Market Operations Manager at US Futures Exchange)

– Emile Servan-Schreiber (NewsFutures CEO and Co-Founder)

– Brian Shiau (The Sim Exchange CEO and Founder)

– Adam Siegel (Inkling Markets CEO and Co-Founder)

– Ashish Singal (Capital Markets Professional)

– Erik Snowberg (Assistant Professor of Economics and Political Science at California Institute of Technology)

– Brad Stewart (Reality Markets Founder)

– Brent Stinski (Media Predict CEO and Founder)

– Karim Tahawi (MyCurrency Founder)

– Jason Trost (Co-Founder of Smarkets)

– George Tziralis (Doctoral Researcher at National Technical University of Athens, Co-Founder of AskMarkets)

– Robert Wilburn (Rimdex CEO and Founder)

– Gerry Wilson (YooNew CEO and Co-Founder)

– Justin Wolfers (Professor of Business and Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania)

– Matt Youill (Chief Technologist at Betfair)

– David Yu (BetFair CEO, Former CTO and COO of BetFair)

– Eric Zitzewitz (Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College)

– Plus, many, many more&#8230-

–

Other Prediction Market People At LinkedIn

– Russell Andersson (Chief Operating Officer, Third Ave Beach)

– Adrian Asher (Global Head of Security at BetFair)

– Henry Berg (Group Manager on Information Markets at Microsoft)

– Matt Carter (Director of the Advanced Technology Group at BetFair)

– Jonathan Cumberlege (Former Director of Registrations &amp- Payments at BetFair)

– Gerard Cunningham (President at BetFair USA)

– Mark Davies (Managing Director of Corporate Affairs of BetFair)

– Mike Dooley (Vice-President of Engineering at NewsFutures)

– Sean Dunbar (Former Head of Technology at Hollywood Stock Exchange)

– Mathias Entenmann (Exchange Managing Director of BetFair)

– Brian Galebach (Freelance Computer Programmer and Owner of Probability Sports)

– Carol Gebert (Former Founder at Incentive Markets)

– Christian Hellmers (Director of US Business Development of BetFair)

– David Jack (TradeFair Director)

– Richard Jaycobs (Cantor Exchange Project Leader)

– Nicholas Jenkins – Nick Jenkins – (Owner of Betcha.com)

– Ajit Kambil (Global Director at Deloitte Research)

– Alam Kasenally (Xpree CTO)

– Mike Knesevitch (Ex-InTrade Director)

– Dawn Tevekelian Keller (Director, Services Business Group &amp- Prediction Markets at Best Buy)

– Robin Marks (Head of Media at BetFair)

– Hunter Morris (Co-Founder of Smarkets)

– George Neumann (Professor of Economics And Applied Mathematics and Computational Sciences at the University of Iowa, Co-Founder of the Iowa Electronic Markets)

– Scott Page (Professor at University of Michigan)

– Paul Pluschkell (Founder &amp- CEO at Spigit)

– Todd Proebsting (Director at Microsoft, Former Group Manager on Information Markets at Microsoft)

– Linda Rebrovick (Consensus Point CEO)

– Don Reynolds (Site Administrator at NewsFutures)

– Felix Salmon (Financial Journalist at Portfolio)

– Bimal Shah (Product Manager at TradeFair)

– Martin Spann (Professor at the University of Passau)

– Will Speck (Director Business Development &amp- Market Research at Financial Times &amp- FT.com)

– Martin Thompson (Engineering Director at TradeFair)

– Geoffrey Tso (Engineering Manager at Xpree)

– Andrew Twaits (Corporate and Business Affairs Director of BetFair Australia)

– Mark Wood (Head of Programme at TradeFair0

– Plus, many, many more&#8230-

–

The worlds #1 resource on enterprise prediction markets

Posted on by
Reply

No Gravatar

– Do not waste $400 on a &#8220-prediction market conference&#8221- run by a San Francisco clown and attended by suckers.

– Quit listening to the Ivory Tower economic canaries who are over-hyping the prediction markets &#8212-and have no experience whatsoever in the field of forecasting.

– Instead, do read this Inkling Markets resource, and do grill Adam Siegel on the phone. It is free, and he is the Real McCoy. [I hope that NewsFutures and CrowdCast will soon provide the same kind of EPM dossier on their respective website.]

inkling

Lights! Camera! Futures trading! Cantor Exchange!

Posted on by
Reply

No Gravatar

Investment News:

&#8220-Technically, you can trade anything, because wherever there is a financial interest, there can be a market,&#8221- said Andre Julian, chief financial officer of Option Investments Inc., an Irvine, Calif.-based independent broker for futures and options traders.

&#8220-People love stats, and movies are something people understand, which is why it could bring some regular people into the futures markets for the first time,&#8221- he said. &#8220-Of course, it might be more difficult if it was launched in the middle of a bull market, when there would be no reason to look beyond stocks.&#8221-

With a $50 trading minimum, the movie futures exchange clearly is hoping to attract a segment of retail-class investors and movie junkies, but once developed, the exchange could also become a vehicle to allow movie moguls to hedge their investments.

&#8220-If it costs a studio $200 million to make a movie, that studio could use this exchange to protect its investment by going short the same amount, and then if they&#8217-re losing money on the open market, they could make it back on the short side,&#8221- Mr. Julian said. &#8220-It all comes down to money, and there&#8217-s always somebody on the opposite side willing to make a trade.&#8221-

Cantor Exchange

Best wishes to Richard Jaycobs.

Statistician and econometrician Nate Silver is going to write up a book on… SUSPENSE, SUSPENSE… not on statistics, not on econometrics… on prediction markets.

Posted on by
Reply

No Gravatar

Via the unjustly suspected mister Cowgill, the LAT:

[Nate] Silver is now at a crossroads, trying to decide what to do with his newfound fame. He’s about to leave Chicago, where he now lives, and move to New York, and he’ll spend the next few months working on a book on prediction markets.

I bet that book will be more impartial that the writings of our economic canaries who are in bed with the exchanges and the vendors.

Internet betting and prediction markets on the Apple iPhone and the Google Android

Posted on by
2

No Gravatar

I watched the Apple event introducing the iPhone 3.0 &#8212-the new version of the operating system for the smart phone. (The competitor is the Google Android, caressed by the innocent mister Cowgill.)

We have now 2 different ecosystems for people to access betting online:

  1. a personal computer (desktop or laptop) + a connection to the Internet (coupled sometimes with the phone system)-
  2. a personal hand-held computer + a connection to both the phone system and the Internet.
  1. a personal computer is piloted by a mouse (or a trackpad) on a plane surface-
  2. a personal hand-held computer is piloted by the fingers.

More and more, businesses (like Automattic/WordPress) are developing a special entry point on the Web for the iPhone and Android users. BetFair has already developed a sub-website for them. No doubt that the other prediction exchanges will follow course &#8212-since the 2 different ecosystems are here to stay.

The fact that Inkling needs five bullet points and a graph to explain short selling is a good indication it’s too complicated.

Posted on by
Reply

No Gravatar

That was Jason Trost&#8217-s comment.

But see, first, Chris Hibbert&#8217-s comment:

My main complaint about using the “short-selling” terminology in prediction markets, is that it uses a term from finance that describes a complicated scenario to describe a simple scenario it doesn’t apply to. In financial markets, short selling means that you accrue money in order to take on a conditional obligation. When you bet against a proposition (on InTrade, Foresight Exchange or (I think) Inkling), you spend money and gain a conditional asset. In the prediction market case, you don’t have any further obligation- there’s no possibility of a margin call. The asset has a non-negative value.

I actually think the way NewsFutures describes binary outcomes is the simplest. They never talk about selling unless you already own the asset. If you don’t own any of the asset, you can either buy it, or click a button to see the opposite view, which you can also buy. They don’t have “yes” and “no”, they just have complementary wordings and titles for opposing outcomes.

Go reading all the comments, there.

Combinatorial Prediction Markets – David Pennock Edition

Posted on by
Reply

No Gravatar

ACM:

[…] Prediction markets are gaining interest because the Internet allows greater worldwide access to them, as well as to the ever-increasing amount of data stored on any topic imaginable (which theoretically allows participants to make more informed predictions, individually and in aggregate). These factors, plus the enormous amount of computing power that will make it possible to instantly calculate exponentially small odds, are stimulating new research on advanced computational models in prediction markets. These models could be capable of analyzing entire events such as the annual NCAA collegiate basketball tournament, which begins a 63-game schedule with 263 possible outcomes by the tournament&#8217-s end. […]

Growing opportunities in internal private-sector prediction markets are also revealing divergent philosophies among the markets&#8217- designers. Many of the public markets feature price-adjustment algorithms built around answering discrete multiple-choice outcomes, such as which candidate will win an election or if a product will launch in month x, y, or z. […]

IEM steering committee member Thomas Rietz, a professor of finance at the university, says the aggregate zero-risk design of the IEM allows the markets to perfectly reflect the aggregate forecast opinions of its participants. By aggregate zero-risk, Rietz explains that when a trader enters a particular bilateral (either/or) market, he or she must buy one share of each choice, called a bundle, for a total cost of $1. If the trader holds the bundle until the market concludes, there is neither profit nor gain. If the trader guesses the outcome successfully, and sells the losing unit of the bundle to another trader while the market is running, he or she picks up the original $1 bet plus whatever price was agreed upon for the losing share that was sold. If the trader chooses to hold onto the loser and sell the eventual winner, however, they will incur the $1 loss at payout time. At any given time, the number of eventual winning shares and losing shares is equal and held by the traders. So, the university bears no counterparty risk and there is no need to provide hedging margins that irrationally affect outcomes. &#8220-The price you would be willing to buy or sell for today is your expectation of its value in the future—the prices can be directly interpreted as a forecast,&#8221- Rietz says. &#8220-In ordinary futures markets, there is a long-lasting debate, going back to John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s, over whether prices can legitimately be used as forecasts, and it all hinges on whether or not people demand a return or face a risk in aggregate when they&#8217-re investing in these contracts.&#8221- […]

One enduring research problem on combinatorial markets is mitigating the effects a virtually unlimited spectrum of outcomes will have on creating markets that are so thin in trades they do not serve their purpose of aggregating information. In such markets, which might bear a resemblance to an enterprise prediction market in that there are not enough participants to provide a statistically valid spread of opinion, Pennock says a market-maker algorithm might serve as a price setter within widely acceptable limits. &#8220-I believe that approximation algorithms will be fine for the market maker, because people don&#8217-t really care about making bets on things that are incredibly unlikely, like 10?6 chance,&#8221- Pennock says. &#8220-But as long as you&#8217-re betting on something with a 10% chance of happening, we&#8217-ll be able to approximate pretty quickly with a market-maker price.&#8221- […]

David Pennock&#8217-s website and blog

Scrutinizing InTrades financial statement for 2008 – Part II

Posted on by
Reply

No Gravatar

Jesse Livermore (a pseudo):

More Intrade Financials

I paid 7.50 euros to see Intrade&#8217-s full filings from 2008 at www.cro.ie. I&#8217-m not going to post them publicly, because they contain the names and addresses of everyone who owns shares in the company. (Fun fact: John Delaney&#8217-s address does not have a number, it has a name.)

A few new pieces of information:

-How can Intrade keep losing money? Like any other startup, by issuing new shares. Intrade issued $2 million in new stock last year. About 320,000 shares were issued, on a base of 1.2 million shares, which would value Intrade at about $10 million, the same as my ballpark estimate yesterday.

-I was correct about the valuation of the Tangible Fixed Assets. Intrade valued anything left over from Trade Exchange Network at $0, and depreciated computer and software equipment by 33% of the purchase price per year.

-The report does not break down expenses and revenues in great detail. It tells total employee compensation, and interest income, but does not spell out commission revenue or other expenses.

-Trade commissions are (properly) recognized only when they are paid. Trading fees are paid when trades are made- expiry fees are paid when contracts expire. Intrade likely recognized a good deal of revenue on election day, which at least mitigated their losses.

I don&#8217-t view this with the shock of some on the Intrade forums. These numbers seem entirely reasonable to me. Intrade has grown substantially comparing 2004 to 2008, and even in the absence of legislative change, will probably be profitable in 2012. I&#8217-m not going to short the contracts on whether Intrade will still be in business. Even in the unlikely event that Intrade were to close, there is no reason to worry about customer deposits.

Part I

The InTrade numbers

Blame the messy CEO -dont blame the media.

Posted on by
Reply

No Gravatar

contention

–

Nothing is more untrue than that.

I do report things &#8212-bad things, and good things (like the NKM scandal, which &#8220-StrangeLove&#8221- alluded to).

I give my opinions &#8212-and I link to or re-publish other people&#8217-s opinions.

If the coverage of InTrade has not always been positive, it is due to the *illegal* nature of their business and the many marketing and P.R. *mistakes* that (former accountant) John Delaney made &#8212-you might remember that he acknowledged some of those.

As for BetFair, and you might remember that I criticized them in the harshest terms at times, the truth is that they are the most polite, correct, professional and ethical people in the worldwide prediction market industry.