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Fabian John (who runs a web forum for the German day-trading community):

Spread Betting/ Spread Trading Companies are regulated by the Financial Services Authority (FSA). (You are using the term “prediction market”, I call it “financial service provider”. This is easier for me to explain how the market works.)

So first, a financial service provider has to be regulated by the domestic regulator. A new EU law (MiFID => http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiFID) allows every [regulated] company doing cross over business to any country within the EU. All they need is the so called “EU passport” and a “Notice to the Regulator” of the target country (for Germany: BaFin www.bafin.de). Once they get the “OK” they can start to sell products to the clients in the target market. They can start marketing campaigns, publishing Ads on- and offline, etc.

For as bookmaker-classified companies, this is not allowed. They can’t do marketing and advertising, except they have a valid license. BetFair doesn’t have an own German license (there are just 4 private) but they cooperate with a company which have one. This is the only way way they can offer bets to German clients. TradeFair binaries, ChoiceOdds etc. are unregulated markets, classified as online gambling. Usually, German traders are NOT allowed to gamble and trade there. ChoiceOdds (www.choiceodds.com) for instance does not accept any German residents.

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Via Fabian John (Financial Services Consultant)

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ABC 20/20 featuring InTrade – (May 9, 2008)

Foretelling The Future: Online Prediction Markets — (4 pages in all)

ABC video

YouTube video

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The most liquid of the Jason Ruspini-created contracts:

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I would like to talk a bit about the Internet marketing of these prediction markets, in the rest of this present post.

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As you all know, Jason Ruspini published a blog post on his (semi-abandoned) blog (spot the comments), was interviewed by Bloomberg, and then went to BNN (a Canadian business TV nobody would have ever heard about, otherwise).

In passing, I want to thank Fabian John of Tom Next (a German web forum on financial event derivative trading) for uploading the video to YouTube.

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Spot the referral stats at the bottom of the screen shot below:

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My Internet marketing thoughts:

1. The Club For Growth blog sent about 20% (22 clicks from CFG out of a total of 108) of all people who watched that video —even though the Club For Growth blog is much, much, much more popular than Midas Oracle (which drills a narrow vertical). This is consistent with what Jakob Nielsen has always said, namely that the Internet is in fact a collection of verticals. (See: Diversity is Power for Specialized Sites. “Small websites [like Midas Oracle] get less traffic than big ones, but they can still dominate their niches. For each question users ask, the Web delivers a different set of sites to provide the answers.”)
2. I think that the difference between the total viewership (277 views) and the referral numbers (108 clicks) is due to the fact that most Midas Oracle feed subscribers watched that Jason Ruspini video from within their feed reader (like Google Reader), and never had to “click” on the link to watch the video from within the YouTube page.
3. The above is a very interesting piece of Internet marketing wisdom, which prediction market firms (like InTrade-TradeSports, BetFair-TradeFair, Betdaq, NewsFutures, HSX, etc.) should mind —especially in light of the focus on prediction market journalism I talked you about yesterday

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Funny enough, John Delaney of InTrade stole the YouTube video (uploaded there by Fabian John of Tom Next), erased the mention of my (dirty) name (put up there by Fab who thought I would like this egotistic plug), and re-posted the video on the InTrade section at YouTube.

That Chris Masse-free copy of the Jason Ruspini video hasn’t attracted many eyeballs, as the stats show:

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If you wish, you may watch again the Jason Ruspini video from within your feed reader:

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Tax rate prediction markets – YouTube

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Related: Bloomberg

Previously: Tax Futures, “In Real Life” – by Jason Ruspini

Tax rate prediction markets – YouTube

Related: Bloomberg

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Jason,

You’re almost perfect. One thing that intrigues me is that you’re pretty bullish on those prediction markets. How come you’re so bold, young man?

ChoiceOdds is a specialist in financial binary trading offering an unrivalled selection of fixed odds, floating odds and binary trades. ChoiceOdds is the only technology platform to offer such a wide variety of trades as well as enhanced frequency of five-minute, hourly, midday and daily trades. Trading on the ChoiceOdds platform allows customers to trade a diverse set of products and markets with limited risk and, in some jurisdictions, tax-free gains.

ChoiceOdds

Via Fabian John.

The IG Index software is called PureDeal and have the capability to offer clients FSB, Binary Bets, Ladder Trading (same line InTrade), and many other products. The new CFD platform looks nearly identically.

This is from our good friend Fabian John (from Germany). Right-click on the image below, and you’ll see a Flash presentation of IG Index’s PureDeal.

First line of a Wall Street Journal piece on Brian Caplan’s book (The Myth of the Rational Voter), which mentions in passing James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom Of Crowds (our bible ).

Thanks to Fabian John in Germany for the good tip.

[...] Solve this cryptic equation, realizing of course that values for M and E could be interchanged. No leading zeros are allowed.
WWWDOT – GOOGLE = DOTCOM
This can be solved through systematic application of logic. [...]

Plenty of science and technology quizzes used by the Google recruiters in this long blog post: Google Recruitment Paper – Reason why Google Freshers are Highly Paid

Via Fabian John in Germany

Andrew Wing

Variety:

He’ll work closely with the HSX team to adapt the technology of the virtual stock exchange in developing new products.

TRANSLATION: The current version of the HSX software is stodgy, which may explain why they have only Storage Markets and Pop Sci as clients for their software platform, it seems.

Thanks to Fabian John in Germany for the tip.

Via Fabian John from Germany