Midas Oracle:
- http://www.midasoracle.org/
- @midasoracle

I am trying to learn how to use Google Wave. First impression: Very weird.

For the Google Wave invite, I thank Martin Frindt of http://www.crowdpark.de/.

UPDATE: Jed says I will get the invite wave in a few days. Patience. I will then be able to invite friends of mine.

My question for Chris is to understand what standard he considers an “expert”. (ie, academic credentials, blog Google PageRank, industry experience, etc.) That’s mainly because I think his standards vary depending on who he wants to criticize on any given day.

I probably wouldn’t use an alternative. –> 65%

It is a lie. They would use BetFair USA instead —or another service. Come on.

And Chris Masse of Midas Oracle is not a “symbiotic detractor”, John. Blame yourself for the occasional slamming in the world’s #1 prediction market blog. I am a fair guy. All the slams published here are deserved. Take it graciously —as the other ones do.

Our good friend Mike Linksvayer has 762.

I have only 61.

I feel ridiculous. I am sure people laugh at me in my back about that low number. I need to have at least 100 friends. Help me.

P.S.: I have been focusing more on my LinkedIn network. See the sidebar for all our PM networking links.

- I like Jed a lot, but he often tweets about his private life. I wouldn’t mind, but the problem is that I follow 70 people, and if they all start tweeting about what they had for breakfast, then it becomes Hell on Earth to use Twitter.

- John Delaney is sometimes interesting, but he re-tweets the InTrade RSS feed, which I am already a subscriber to in Google Reader. That is infernal to see 2 times the same info. To add salt to injury, the InTrade RSS feed always re-publishes a second time their feed items. I don’t know why they do that. It is really annoying. So if you subscribe to John Delaney’s Twitter feed, who re-tweets the InTrade feed, then you get the same thing 4 times in a row. It is the craziest thing I have ever seen on the Web. Plus, John Delaney now uses a script to follow every person who follows him —a standard tactic used by the Twitter spammers. It is a bad thing to do.

Addendum:

- Felix Salmon and Tim O’Reilly make a good usage of Twitter. And Felix Salmon is smart enough to poll his people about his Twitter usage.

I have been asked many times by Kruijs on HubDub to update people about the prediction markets created about moi. So, here it is. But, first, a little background. Since the beginning of this year, I have adopted a new stance, as you have seen if you follow Midas Oracle. I am much more skeptical of the claims made by the prediction market people, and I do everything I can to pierce the hype bubble. As you understand, some people who are making a living on surfing on the prediction market hype are not that happy about what I write here. I have been the target of:

1. an EPM software provider (who tried to hide and to pin it on another EPM software provider);
2. an EPM conference organizer (who performed a legal hoax, which lead to the “regrets” episode).

The field of prediction markets comprises both public prediction markets and enterprise prediction markets. The public prediction markets are interesting. They provide objectivity to the public. (And the real-money prediction markets are self sustainable.) However, the jury is still out when it comes to the pertinence and utility of private prediction markets. As I blogged many times, many liars and stupid people have infiltrated the EPM field, and the rest of the EPM industry is incapable of making the cleaning. Worse, they have an association where the fox is in charge of the hen house —giving him liberty to perform hoaxes under any pseudonym he chooses.

OK, now, an update on the HubDub prediction markets.

1. I was not behind the websites chrismasse.com and overcomingmidas.com. Anybody who bet on my name will finish in slip, and I will make sure that that’s what happens to anyone who dares.
2. The person who was behind has been identified at 90%. However, that’s not 100%, and so the set of prediction markets will be expired as “not revealed”. However, that does not mean that that person has escaped the justice of the men.

I am not sure whether Kruijs will be satisfied with this note, but that’s all I have to say at this time. As for the question asked in the title, I leave it to the readers.

http://www.haloscan.com/comments/caveatbettor/3098722113787876052/

Actually, it is by design that Midas Oracle publishes both the good and the bad about prediction markets. The other blogs (Marginal Revolution, Overcoming Whatever, Freakonomics, Odd Head, Mercury, Wiser Than The Crowd, etc.) cherry-pick the good news —and censor the bad news. They never informed you about the 2006 NKM scandal. They never informed you about the fact that The Economist has published a rather negative take on enterprise prediction markets. They never informed you about the fact that Gartner has reported that the enterprise prediction markets are losing ground fast. And I could go on forever.

If you want to read more gentle bloggers, go reading David Pennock or Jed Christiansen. They are good, kind, conformist bloggers. They will never publish the bad news. They will never pick a fight with anyone in the industry, because their biggest dream is to belong to that industry. Midas Oracle, by design, in an independent publication —independent from the industry (and the trading-data-fed academia). This is the reason why Midas Oracle will neither join the PMIA nor appear in the $400-a-seat vendor-sponsored conferences. The ultimate goal of Midas Oracle is to publish the truth —not to make friends with CEOs and researchers. And if they rate Midas Oracle as pesky, that is fine —that means we have published in the past some bits of truth that they didn’t want you to know. The only judgment that matters for Midas Oracle is our readers’ one. The web traffic is solid, the number of feed subscribers increase each week, the PageRank is excellent, we have received plenty of kudos, and Google Web Search loves Midas Oracle —thank you very much.

[...] In virtually every case, the prediction market forecast is closer to the official HP forecast than it is to the actual outcome. Perhaps these markets are better at forecasting the forecast than they are at forecasting the outcome! Looking further into the results, while most of the predictions have a smaller error than the HP official forecasts, the differences are, in most cases, quite small. For example, in Event 3, the HP forecast error was 59.549% vs. 53.333% for the prediction market. They’re both really poor forecasts. To the decision-maker, the difference between these forecasts is not material.

There were eight markets that had HP official forecasts. In four of these (50%), the forecast error was greater than 25%. Even though, only three of the prediction market forecast errors were greater than 25%, this can hardly be a ringing endorsement for the accuracy of prediction markets (at least in this study). [...]

To the despair of this man, Paul’s analysis is quite similar to mine (circa February 14, 2009):

The prediction market technology is not a disruptive technology, and the social utility of the prediction markets is marginal. Number one, the aggregated information has value only for the totally uninformed people (a group that comprises those who overly obsess with prediction markets and have a narrow cultural universe). Number two, the added accuracy (if any) is minute, and, anyway, doesn’t fill up the gap between expectations and omniscience (which is how people judge forecasters). In our view, the social utility of the prediction markets lays in efficiency, not in accuracy. In complicated situations, the prediction markets integrate expectations (informed by facts and expertise) much faster than the mass media do. Their accuracy/efficiency is their uniqueness. It is their velocity that we should put to work.

Prediction markets are not a disruptive technology, but merely another means of forecasting.

Go reading Paul’s analysis in full.

I would like to add 2 things to Paul’s conclusion:

1. We have been lied to about the real value of the prediction markets. Part of the “field of prediction markets” (which is a terminology that encompasses more people and organizations than just the prediction market industry) is made up of liars who live by the hype and will die by the hype.
2. Prediction markets have value in specific cases where it could be demonstrated that an information aggregation mechanism is the appropriate method that should be put at work in those cases (and not in others). Neither the Ivory Tower economic canaries nor the self-described prediction market “practitioners” have done this job.