Part I (posted on his blog):

[...] In the CDA markets, you are either a price-taker (market orders) or price-maker (limit orders). As a price-taker, you have to be conscious of liquidity available and be careful not to trade too large. Even the smallest of traders in the thinnest of markets can move prices to their detriment. You can be a price-maker to avoid all this, but then you have to hope you set your limit order at just the right price, or you have opportunity costs. If you don’t execute well, you lose. [...]

Part II (posted on Midas Oracle):

[...] The ideal market. An ideal dark market for CASTrader would be one that operated continuously, scaled well, and is general purpose like a CDA, while having the efficiency, volatility and trade encouraging characteristics of a call market, combined with the continuous liquidity and ability to function in thin markets of Hanson’s combinatorial market. To boot, I’d like it to be fair to traders of all sizes, as well as easy to program relative to a CDA. Is that possible? [...]

Part III (posted on his blog):

[...] Conclusion. There are some distinct disadvantages to this type of market to balance what appear to be substantial advantages. First, describing a continuous market order isn’t necessarily a human-friendly task. My own discretionary trading with the system will likely involve a learning curve. Second, typical trades will be broken up into many microtrades, which is a nightmare for anything but an automated accounting system. The cross-market solver will be a technical challenge to get working efficiently, but will at least be much more interesting to code than the order-matching algorithm of a CDA. Third, this is unknown territory, kind of like CASTrader, and that’s exactly why I’m choosing to adopt this new market design.

Amazing journey.

#1. Very few readers do subscribe to our prediction market blogs using a (PC-based or Web-based) feed reader —although, on Midas Oracle, the number of subscribers is higher than the daily visitors coming directly from browser bookmarks (i.e., other than the people coming from Google Search, which is very high).

#2. Other than CFM, Midas Oracle and Odd Head, the prediction market blogs are equivalent to self masturbation (i.e., onanism) —this said with all due respect to their authors (in particular those “from the London School of Economics”).

#3. The future belongs to often-updated group blogs (with substantial participation).

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First, I give you the numbers for CFM and MIDAS ORACLE. Then, I give you the numbers for the other prediction market blogs.

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#1. PC-based feed subscribers: a big number.

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#2. Web-based feed subscribers:

CFM: 205 subscribers
Midas Oracle: 283 subscribers (that is, not including 14 comment subscriptions)

Google Reader + Google IG
83 CFM
134 MO post feed
11 MO comment feed
6 MO best-post feed

BlogLines
51 CFM
47 MO post feed
3 MO comment feed
3 MO best-post feed

NetVibes
45 CFM
44 MO post feed
0 MO comment feed
26 MO best-post feed

NewsGator
13 CFM
17 MO post feed
0 MO comment feed
1 MO best-post feed

My Yahoo!
7 CFM
3 MO post feed
0 MO comment feed
0 MO best-post feed

Rojo
5 CFM
2 MO post feed
0 MO comment feed
0 MO best-post feed

Pluck
1 CFM
0 MO post feed
0 MO comment feed
0 MO best-post feed

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Other Prediction Market Blogs:

- JUST FOR COMPARISON –> Marginal Revolution (by Tyler Cowen): +2,768 subscribers at BlogLines

- NOT REALLY A PREDICTION MARKET BLOG –> OvercomingErrors (by Robin Hanson et al.): 70 + 51 = 121 subscribers at BlogLines

- Risk Markets And Politics (by Jason Ruspini): 53 subscribers at BlogLines

- Odd Head (by David Pennock, of Yahoo! Research): 41 subscribers at BlogLines

- Hollywood Stock Exchange blog (by David Perry): 20 subscribers at BlogLines

- Consensus Point blog (by David Perry): 18 subscribers at BlogLines

- Inkling Markets blog (by Adam Siegel): 17 subscribers at BlogLines

- Alea (by JC Kommer): 17 subscribers at BlogLines

- Betting Market site feed (by Niall O’Connor): 12 subscribers at BlogLines

- TradeSports site feed (by John Delaney et al.): 10 subscribers at BlogLines

- Nasty, Brutish And Tall (by Steve Roman): 8 subscribers at BlogLines

- InTrade site feed (by John Delaney et al.): 5 subscribers at BlogLines

- NewsFutures blog (by Emile Servan-Schreiber): 5 subscribers at BlogLines

- Bo Cowgill blog (by Bo Cowgill): 4 subscribers at BlogLines

- CASTrader (by Alan Jewell): 3 subscribers at BlogLines

- Usable Markets (by Alex Kirtland): 2 subscribers at BlogLines

- Caveat Bettor (by Caveat Bettor): 2 subscribers at BlogLines

- Mercury blog (by Jed Christiansen, “from the London School of Economics”): 2 subscribers at BlogLines

- SmartCrowd (by”Paul”): 2 subscribers at BlogLines

- The Political Maven (by Alex Forshaw): 1 subscriber at BlogLines –> moi

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Technical Note: The feeds generated by the blogging software were added to BlogLines, when possible —preferably not the FeedBurner feeds (for personal, aesthetic reasons). So it could be that the audience of one or two blogs in the listing are underestimated.

I’m republishing here his reading list.

QUOTE

The Big Kahunas of the financial blog world (imo): The Big Picture and the Kirk Report, both of which linked to me a few weeks back. A belated thanks, guys. Both are very popular for many reasons. Ticker Sense is the blog of Lazlo Birinyi’s firm – their graphs are typically worth a thousand words.

Brett Steenbarger’s TraderFeed – Trading psychology guru and lots of market analysis deep into the mechanics of the market. His weblog is chock full of interesting links.

C(omp)++ – Quant oriented computation – need I say more?

CXO Advisory – excellent summaries of applicable financial research. Nearly every article is a must-read, imo.

Midas Oracle – Chris Masse’s blog is a humorously provocative firehose of information on the prediction markets. It’s a community blog where Chris graciously invited me to be a guest author, and I’ve written a post on traders and the prediction markets and moi. Someday in the not too distant future, I hope CASTrader will hook into prediction markets. Until then, I’ll just write about them there from time to time like I know what I’m talking about.

FINTAG – Adventures, commentary and opinions of a UK-based (soon to be ex?) hedge fund manager. All About Alpha is a Canadian who appears to be tapped into the bleeding edge of the hedge fund world.

Ken’s Nonsense – a misleading new blog title, because posts are anything but. By a former math professor turned computer engineer/trader.

Lloyd’s Investment Blog – Low volume, but interesting research.

Michael Covel – Author and trend follower – good links from time to time, plus he interviewed with Lindsay – what more could a blogger aspire to?

MoneyScience – Another relative firehose of information, with plenty of quantitative finance and science mixed in – a must read.

The Quants: QuantInvestor, World Beta and Quantitative Trading. Must reads all.

C++ Trader – a new blog by Mathew Henry who works at a “boutique investment bank” and whose blog title says it all. Mathew, along with Rod at Perfectly Reasonable Deviations (another blog I read religiously and link to often) nominated this blog for the Thinking Blogger Award, for which I am very honored.

The Park Paradigm

Herb Greenberg – There’s $$$ hidden between the lines of some of his posts, as I can certainly attest.

Wall Street and Technology – Always nice to know how the big boys and girls do it.

Yaser Anwar – new to me, but good stuff from a range of perspectives.

Portfolio Analysis. Very new, but looks like it will be a good one based on the articles so far.

plus a couple of quant boards for good measure:

Nuclear Phynance

Elite Trader

END OF QUOTE

Let’s add CASTrader (A quest for 50%-plus returns in the financial markets via Complex Adaptive Systems and Quantitative Finance) in the list.

His last post here, on Midas Oracle. (Beware, I think he mingled the terms “prediction markets” and “financial markets”.)