Wired UK (Hunter Morris and Jason Trost).

Platform Metrics (More Soon)
Platform operational: Since 2001
Total Predictions: 619,141,899
Average Daily Predictions: 169,589

This is just a preposterous misrepresentation of the volume of activity on the site.

The average number of contracts traded per day for the year to date is 9k, with a median of 8k. Those numbers are way up from 2010, before the change from high transaction fees to a small, flat monthly fee.

Since there is someone on both sides of each trade, it’s could be fair to say that each trade represents two predictions so you can double the trading volume if you are counting “predictions” instead. But counting predictions raises another problem.

If I think Sarah Palin will run and I place an order to buy 100 contracts, I have not made 100 predictions. I have made one prediction. (Even if I place an order today, and another order tomorrow, unless I am buying or selling at a very different price from the first order it’s a stretch to say that I’m making new predictions with every order.)

So there are at least two problems:

One is that it’s silly to call every contract a separate prediction when a single person, acting on a single point of view (e.g., Palin has a 25-30% chance of running) can buy or sell many individual contracts (buying at 24, selling at 31, for instance, without changing their “prediction” at all). And of course these trades often happen in blocks of 10 or 100 or 1000 contracts anyway.

Two is that whether you are counting, trades, contracts traded, or “predictions” you don’t get anywhere near the 170k daily “somethings” that Intrade is claiming. Unless…

Perhaps they are not only counting each contract as a separate “prediction,” even if a single order is for many contracts. Perhaps they are also counting every order, whether it is executed or not. That is, I put in an order to buy 100 contracts of Palin at 24, and they count 100 “predictions.” Then I put in an order to buy 500 at 10, and another for 1000 at 1, and another for 5000 at .1, and a sell for 1000 at 99… and by Intrade’s math I’ve just made nearly eight thousand predictions. and when I change the order for 100 at 24 to 100 at 24.1, that’s another 100 predictions. And when some bozo puts in an order to buy 5000 shares of something for a penny after the event has already happened, that’s 5k more “predictions.”

The urge to publish big, impressive numbers about activity on Intrade is understandable. Venturing into fantasyland to get there is just embarrassing.

Speaking of math, my very rough estimate is that Intrade is collecting twice as much per month in fees via the $5/month charge than they would have been based on the pre-2011 transaction fees.

This is good for Intrade, good for active traders, and horrid for smaller accounts. It’s also a short-term situation with a bad ending. Once the small accounts are mostly closed out or leeched down to a zero balance, then what? How many mid- or large-sized, reasonably active accounts are there? Within 2-3 years can one really expect there to be more than a few thousand accounts left? Some new big players may come into the mix if they see the good deal, but each one is only worth $60/year.

Even if you think Intrade will have 15k active accounts in a few years (which I don’t), that’s still less than a million dollars of top line revenue. Larger traders will probably tolerate an increase in fees at some point, but still I do not see how Intrade gets from the current situation to a future as a solid, profitable, growing company that is more than a flea compared to BetFair.

- How far in advance can prediction markets make accurate predictions?
- How will we know the point in time when a prediction is ‘accurate’?
- Why are there wildly different predictions of the same outcome in different prediction markets?
- How do we know which market is accurate?
- Is it a matter of prediction market efficiency?

The real benefit, in my opinion, is that prediction markets provide a better measurement of uncertainty around the outcome than do traditional forecasting methods.

What’s the difference between predict a lot y Bolsa de predicciones? they have the same things or at least very similar. ?Are you the same? They have predictions, groups, events etc. the only difference is the language; BP is in spanish.

This is my answer.

The main difference is that on bolsadepredicciones (and other prediction markets like crowdcast, inklingmarkets, intrade, newsfutures, hubdub RIP, and WorldCupX.com — a new site with a nice/fresh look and good social hooks) every prediction is independent (separate) and there are at most a few thousand.

In predictalot, all predictions are interrelated (predicting Spain to win automatically increases Spain’s odds of reaching the knockout round) and there are millions and millions of predictions possible, far more than other sites.

We also think our interface is easier to use than others, but you be the judge.

Predictions are flowing in about every three minutes. Here are some from the last half hour:

Chile will finish second in their group. Current odds: 33.50%.
Spain will finish first in their group. Current odds: 52.48%.
Spain will play Portugal in the knockout stage. Current odds: 48.77%.
Roger joined the group ‘inetco’
Spain will advance further than Greece. Current odds: 76.93%.
Spain will not advance to the Knockout Stage. Current odds: 23.13%.
Spain will advance to the Knockout Stage. Current odds: 77.86%.
Both United States and Uruguay will advance to Quaterfinals. Current odds: 60.04%.

Finally, here are instructions for playing predictalot on your iPad:

1. Click Safari
2. Go to predictalot.yahoo.com

The journalistic rule should be that, if you cite one prediction exchange, you should cite the one that is the most liquid on the market you are writing about. For UK politics, it is clearly BetFair.

BetFair has clearly a PR problem.

*****
Newbie

Joined: 24/01/2010 15:58:35

Messages: 1

Original thread at midasoracle.org:

So the actor has to a) not care about the transaction fee and b) have limitless margin. Intrade fits the bill for both of these. a) they don’t care about transaction fees because they are ultimately collecting them and b) if you only short when the bids are summed to over 100, it’s essentially an arb.

Until mid-April 2010, Intrade will refund market taking and expiry fees for arb trades – details here.

Some products with a single guaranteed outcome are linked for cross-margining purposes. If you collect at least $10 by shorting all three contracts for the 2012 presidential election, then you will not have any funds frozen. The contract rules will tell you if a product is not linked (e.g. 2012 republican presidential nominees).

Intrade provides an API for developing trading applications. I am running a bot to take out market imbalances and as far as I’m aware Intrade is not competing with me.

Ah.

I am utterly convinced Intrade participates in its own markets. Every few hours some kind of API hits the bids on the GOP 2012 nomination contract when the bids sum to more 100. It will even short bids at 0.1, which is a money losing proposition when you figure the transaction cost alone of 0.3 (since the price is below 5). Also, the amount of margin required to short all of these bids is in the millions of dollars.

So the actor has to a) not care about the transaction fee and b) have limitless margin. Intrade fits the bill for both of these. a) they don’t care about transaction fees because they are ultimately collecting them and b) if you only short when the bids are summed to over 100, it’s essentially an arb.

The trader also tells me that, on the InTrade forums where those questions were asked many times, InTrade never denied that they trade on their own prediction markets.

Previously: What was Max Keiser doing at InTrade HQ two years ago? –> “due diligence”…!??…

Next: Does InTrade participate on its 2012 Republication Nomination prediction markets?

Makes no sense at all.

The BetFair PR boys have an omelet on their face. They should work harder.

DISAMBIGUATION: The “illiquid” adjective refers to the UK political markets on InTrade —not the US political prediction markets.

Despite some limited evidence, the insistence on traders needing to know the direction of manipulation isn’t too compelling since the direction will be manifest insofar as the price is “wrong.” “Noise trader” is a politically loaded and misleading term. Misleading because it suggests that the mean effect will be zero, when in reality “noise trading” usually takes the form of feedback trading. Lack of feedback trading is a significant assumption in the Hanson manipulation papers. Fortunately, prediction markets have objective settlements at specified times, unlike traditional assets where the meaning of prices is open to interpretation, making them more prone to feedback trading and irrational booms and busts.

With prediction markets, conditions for manipulation are more favorable when the settlement is far off in time, and when there are subjective inputs to the settlement, e.g. in politics. A distant settlement simultaneously makes it less clear what the real price should be, and delays manipulator losses because there is less incentive to correct price. At the limit, a manipulator could introduce a price distortion when a contract is launched, only to reverse position for small liquidity-related loss immediately before settlement, thereby destroying the markets “integral” of error over time.

Another big assumption, also identified by Paul Hewitt, is that traders have equal account sizes. But maybe this isn’t a huge problem if settlement is forthcoming, and maybe the issue could be mitigated with additional exchange disclosures, such as the standard deviation of position sizes in a given market. While this could discourage liquidity as large traders would become paranoid about their positions, it is essentially a “soft” position limit, and traders would be forewarned of one-sided markets (which could of course be the result of someone well-informed, but I – the google-anonymous* writer – would bet that more concentration comes with more error on average… this can be tested by someone with the data, of course maintaining trader anonymity)

Even accounting for long-term settlement, feedback trading, semi-subjective settlements, and account size imbalances, it seems one would have to abide to an overly rigid tenet of “do no harm” to hold that prediction markets are, on net, a bad idea. (Do no harm is of course abhorrent to libertarians, and even doctors don’t actually follow such a rule.) Moreover, some pathologies like political self-fulfilling prophecy will only happen if prediction markets have already demonstrated their value and have become more popular. But even if one believes in their long term success, single pathologies can damage one’s reputation permanently… if one plans to die at a reasonable age.

[*Given the political climate, many firms have issued directives to employees to not engage in even the slightest appearance of impropriety, which might include blogging on manipulation.]