Today, Felix Salmon points to lottery tickets.

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Let’s Get Something Straight
By: John Cole June 13, 2008 at 6:35 pm

I liked Tim Russert, even though I thought his BS gotcha nonsense was thorough idiocy and not helping the debate at all. He was a likable guy- friendly, always smiling. I understand it is a loss for the beltway folks, and he had a lot of really good friends and meant a lot to people, and I would be dishonest if I failed to mention that I feel sad by his passing.

MSNBC has been running nothing but a 5 hour (and presumably it will go until 11 pm or beyond) marathon of Russert remembrance. CNN has done their due diligence, and Fox news has spent at least the last half hour talking non-stop about him.

But let’s get something straight- what I am watching right now on the cable news shows is indicative of the problem- no clearer demonstration of the fact that they consider themselves to be players and the insiders and, well, part of the village, is needed. This is precisely the problem. They have walked the corridors of power so long that they honestly think they are the story. It is creepy and sick and the reason politicians get away with all the crap they get away with these days.

Tim Russert was a newsman. He was not the Pope. This is not the JFK assassination, or Reagan’s death, or the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion. A newsman died. We know you miss him, but please shut up and get back to work.

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Devoting the whole NBC Nightly News bulletin (on Friday, June 13, 2008) was simply insane.

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INSANE.

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i followed him every Sunday.

But his slanted interview of Ron Paul left me with a sour taste in my mouth.

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Video
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Check what he wrote on Katrina and on Condoleeza Rice.

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And, now, the clincher:

[Scott McClellan] does not exempt himself from failings — “I fell far short of living up to the kind of public servant I wanted to be” — and calls the news media “complicit enablers” in the White House’s “carefully orchestrated campaign to shape and manipulate sources of public approval” in the march to the Iraq war in 2002 and 2003.

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More in The Politico – (3 pages)

History appears poised to confirm what most Americans today have decided: that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder. No one, including me, can know with absolute certainty how the war will be viewed decades from now when we can more fully understand its impact. What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary. [...]

The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. … In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served. [...]

I still like and admire President Bush. But he and his advisers confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war. … In this regard, he was terribly ill-served by his top advisers, especially those involved directly in national security.I still like and admire President Bush. But he and his advisers confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war. … In this regard, he was terribly ill-served by his top advisers, especially those involved directly in national security. [...]

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More from AJC.

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Let’s create a prediction market on who’ll be the next former White House official who will sell Bush down the river.

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UPDATE:

NBC News

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AP

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NBC News

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Tim Russert

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Jessica Yellin

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Today

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Lawrence O’Donnell (a leftist journalist –but a good one, whom I appreciate):

A senior campaign official and Clinton confidante has told me that there will be a Democratic nominee by June 15. [...] Yes, Clinton spokespersons publicly seem to be lost on gravity-free planet Clinton, but privately they know the end is near.

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There’s a quasi consensus among the political pundits to say that Hillary Clinton will not be the Democratic nominee in November 2008.

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Tim Russert:

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That was Wednesday night. I have just watched NBC Nightly News this Thursday, and the same Tim Russert appeared with 2 white boards full of calculations, which all pointed to Hillary Clinton being toasted.

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My general thoughts about the place of the political prediction markets in this primary election season:

1. The weight of the political prediction markets in the US political scenery is close to epsilon. I have been monitoring Memeorandum (the Web’s best political news and opinion aggregator), and it has never featured one piece of political prediction market journalism —not only that, but none of the popular popular pieces, featured by Memeorandum, has ever mentioned the political prediction markets and their probabilities. The people who breathe politics on a daily basis (the experts and the bloggers) don’t give the first fig about the prediction markets. They couldn’t care less.
2. The prediction market luminaries who predicted that the prediction markets were to become a tool used in political campaigns were dead wrong. I have never read that campaign staffers use actively the political prediction markets. Campaigns use private polls, only.
3. Like in 2004 (when Howard Dean was crowned, early on), the prediction markets, at the start of the primary season, were incapable of foreseeing who would be each party’s nominee, ultimately —Barack Obama and John McCain both came out of the blue. But the polls and the political experts didn’t see them, too.
4. Nothing surprising in that. While the idiots emphasize the supposed magical power of the prediction markets (using adjectives such as “fascinating” or “intriguing” when writing about them), the well informed people know for a fact that they simply aggregate information from the primary, advanced indicators and the opinions expressed by the political experts. Nothing more than that. The prediction markets are incapable of foretelling upsets, by essence.
5. The last weeks were particularly interesting, in that regard, because the Obama-vs-Clinton polls have been of no interest —only the views of the political experts who could count in terms of delegates and super-delegates were of interest. The political prediction markets on the Democratic side, these last weeks, have been a reflection of the pundits’ calculations.
6. Outside of our blog, the only person who has aimed at practicing prediction market journalism is Justin Wolfers. He has understood the concept.
7. I would have my own concept of prediction market journalism, and I don’t agree with the way he executes, but that’s a detail. The main thing is that he has gotten the concept. That’s what is important, and that’s what makes all the difference between Justin Wolfers and the HubDub bloggers (for instance). The concept. The concept. The concept. The idea is to center the narrative around the inputs given by the relevant prediction market(s) —not just gluing artificially news bits and a prediction market chart (or a link to a prediction market).
8. InTrade, BetFair and NewsFutures are, in my view, the 3 prediction exchanges that matter for prediction market journalism —as of now.

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Now, the charts of the expired prediction markets —starting with Pennsylvania (of 2 weeks ago):

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Yesterday’s North Carolina:

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Yesterday’s Indiana:

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Sources: InTrade & BetFair

(Go there for the remaining primaries and caucuses. I don’t put them on, here, because they don’t matter anymore.)

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Now, the charts of the prediction markets, going forward:

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2008 US Presidential Election Winner – Individual

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2008 US Presidential Elections

Source: Dynamic, compound prediction market charts from InTrade

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Next US President

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Winning Party

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Female President?

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Democratic Candidate

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Republican Candidate

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Source: BetFair Politics Zone

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Barack Obama to win the Democratic nomination

© NewsFutures

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Hillary Clinton to win the Democratic nomination

© NewsFutures

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Next US President Will Be Democratic.

© NewsFutures

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Next US President Will Be Republican.

© NewsFutures

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Explainer On Prediction Markets

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Prediction markets produce dynamic, objective probabilistic predictions on the outcomes of future events by aggregating disparate pieces of information that traders bring when they agree on prices. Prediction markets are meta forecasting tools that feed on the advanced indicators (i.e., the primary sources of information). Garbage in, garbage out… Intelligence in, intelligence out…

A prediction market is a market for a contract that yields payments based on the outcome of a partially uncertain future event, such as an election. A contract pays $100 only if candidate X wins the election, and $0 otherwise. When the market price of an X contract is $60, the prediction market believes that candidate X has a 60% chance of winning the election. The price of this event derivative can be interpreted as the objective probability of the future outcome (i.e., its most statistically accurate forecast). A 60% probability means that, in a series of events each with a 60% probability, then 6 times out of 10, the favored outcome will occur; and 4 times out of 10, the unfavored outcome will occur.

Each prediction exchange organizes its own set of real-money and/or play-money markets, using either a CDA or a MSR mechanism.

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More Info:

- The Best Resources On Prediction Markets = The Best External Web Links + The Best Midas Oracle Posts

- Prediction Market Science

- The Midas Oracle Explainers On Prediction Markets

- All The Midas Oracle Explainers On Prediction Markets

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[I]n the blogosphere, [] competition is a good thing, not a bad thing. I want other finance blogs to launch, the more the better. And I want them to be written by keener minds than mine. The more that happens, the more traffic I’ll get – that’s the way the conversation works. Other media don’t work like that: if I’m watching ABC, I’m not watching NBC. But blogs are different, and don’t operate according to that kind of zero-sum mathematics. [...]

Felix Salmon got it —once again.

David Perry, my good Lord, please take notes.

So why picking on the prediction markets, then? (Question to Daniel Gross, Niall O’Connor, Paul Krugman, JC Kommer, Barry Ritholtz, etc.)

Ron Paul on Jay Leno (NBC’s Tonite Show)

As of today, Larry Craig is still a member of the US Senate, till November 2008. He did not resigned. What happened, from his first statement highlighted in the first sentence above, is that he later changed his mind —which we are all entitled to do under any Constitution, of course.

To say “I intent to” means nothing, as Larry Craig said privately to his lawyer, and as veteran Tim Russert knows too well:

MR. RUSSERT: If, if you do not win the Republican nomination for president, will you run as an independent in 2008?

REP. PAUL: I have no intention to do that.

MR. RUSSERT: Absolute promise.

REP. PAUL: I have no intention of doing that.

MR. RUSSERT: Well, but “no intention” is a wiggle word.

REP. PAUL: Well, OK, I deserve one wiggle now and then, Tim. I mean, what the devil…

MR. RUSSERT: So no–so no Shermanesque statement.

REP. PAUL: You know, I…

MR. RUSSERT: “I will not run as an independent.”

REP. PAUL: Well, I can be pretty darned sure that I have no intention, no plans of doing it, and that’s about 99.9 percent. I don’t like people who are such absolutists, “I will never do this, or I will win, I’m going to come in first.” I don’t like those absolutists terms in politics.

MR. RUSSERT: But the door’s open a little bit.

REP. PAUL: Not very much. It really isn’t. I, I don’t–Tim, we just raised $10 million in two days. We haven’t even had a race, we have February 5th coming up. We have a campaign to run. Why–do you ask all the other–how many other candidates have you asked, “Are you going to run as a third party candidate if you don’t win?” Have you asked John McCain that?

MR. RUSSERT: Well, if someone has a history of running as a third party candidate, sure. You ran in ’88 as a Libertarian.

REP. PAUL: Yeah, well, I know…

MR. RUSSERT: It’s a logical question.

REP. PAUL: …but there are independents. So I–ask them, too.

MR. RUSSERT: I will.

External Link: The gay sexual life of US Senator Larry Craig

Hollywood Ending – Trader Daily – October 4, 2007 – by Robert LaFranco

A decade ago, a Wall Street trader and an L.A. dealmaker united to remake the movie industry in the image of the markets. They had capital, ambition, securities-industry savvy and an American public captivated by money and celebrity. So whatever became of the Hollywood Stock Exchange?

In late March 2000, Max Keiser and Michael Burns were tucked away in the VIP lounge of Hollywood’s House of Blues, gleefully presiding over one of the town’s hottest Oscar parties. The duo surveyed the scene: a throng of industry insiders, journalists, style-savvy party crashers, even Ron Jeremy, all descending on a buffet table brimming with enough gourmet fare to feed a small former Soviet republic. Spinning tunes was Moby — among the world’s best-known DJs at the time — while Earth, Wind & Fire prepared for their headline set. Outside, a crowd of wannabes loitered anxiously around the velvet ropes, angling for a way to get in.

It was a heady time for Keiser and Burns, two former finance whiz kids who five years earlier had teamed up to start the Hollywood Stock Exchange. Their dot-com-era high flyer was going to change the movie business by revolutionizing the way movies were paid for — giving independent filmmakers a way to raise money online from the public and other investors. The way they saw it, soon anybody with a credit card and a computer could become the next Robert Evans.

Already, Keiser was a regular on Entertainment Tonight and The Howard Stern Show. Two months earlier, the HSX had proven the surprise hit of the Sundance Film Festival — publicity-wise, anyway — as Keiser and Burns’s rented cafe drew hefty crowds who came for free cappuccino and a chance to check their e-mail. But the best buzz had come a few weeks later, when the HSX unveiled an enormous, colorful ticker in the heart of West Hollywood, offering live updates of “star stock” and “movie bond” prices scrolling along the side of a 7,000-square-foot piece of prime real estate like a newfangled companion to the Hollywood sign.

“We were going to change the way Hollywood worked,” says Keiser today. “It was an industry ready for change.”

But like many rising stars in Tinseltown, Keiser and Burns — and the exchange they created — would eventually flicker and dim. Not long after Oscar night 2000, the already buckling stock market cratered with sickening ferocity and sank into a three-year tailspin. For HSX, it was the moment in the movie when the ship hits the iceberg.

Today the founders and original investors in the Hollywood Stock Exchange are scattered around the globe with little to show for their efforts but a curious line item on their résumés. It’s likely small solace to them that hedge funds and Hollywood are now converging like at no time in history — at least proving that their notion of an impending sea change in the way movies are financed was somewhat prescient. And it’s probably salt in their wounds to know that in June, Dallas Mavericks owners Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner launched their own Hollywood financing firm — in their case, for buying out and bundling profit-sharing deals. For their part, Keiser and Burns remain the hapless protagonists of that rarest of Hollywood productions: a decade-long epic without a happy ending. And for every trader who has ever longed to close his positions, take his profits and stumble from the trading floor in pursuit of his dreams, theirs might be a reminder that not all markets are meant to be made.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. In 1995, Max Keiser, a 35-year-old former stockbroker and one of Shearson Lehman’s biggest options producers, had come to Hollywood to work on a movie project that his old buddy Alec Baldwin had gotten placed at Miramax. Michael Burns, an investment banker with Prudential Securities in Los Angeles, was a 37-year-old with strong ties to the movie industry. Burns and Keiser met while working together at Shearson Lehman in the ’80s, but in 1990 went their separate ways, Keiser to Paris to live off his Wall Street gains. One day, while sitting in a Hollywood cafe called Barney’s Beanery, Burns and Keiser alighted upon the idea for an exchange in entertainment futures. Perhaps it was the high-octane espresso talking, but the way they saw it, their notion was revolutionary. The inspiration had come to them while thumbing through an industry trade publication, where they had seen a printed weekend box-office tally.

“It looked just like the listings for the S&P 500,” Keiser says. “I suddenly looked at the movie industry like Michael Milken viewed the bond market. The original business plan of HSX was an exchange for predictive products that would lead to re-monetizing the industry and breaking up the Hollywood cartel. Using this platform we would allow many, many, many more people to have access to funds.”

Based on his knowledge of the NYSE, Keiser began mapping out an exchange. He mimicked the double-action trading environment of a real exchange, setting up the whole thing in a virtual environment. He established a currency and treasury function, a virtual banking system, a virtual interest-rate function and other virtual back-end trading functions that he would eventually patent as the Virtual Specialist. Then he and Burns set about seeking approval to operate as an exchange that could democratize the insular movie business.

There was, however, just one little problem. The lack of transparency in Hollywood studio accounting practices made actual deliverables an impossible strategy to execute. Meanwhile, their business plan was hamstrung by Blue Sky laws and their inability to secure the CFTC’s blessing. So Burns came up with a new idea: If they pitched the product as a game and developed the whole thing as a virtual economy, they would avoid the regulations — and still have a robust trading environment that could someday be used as a real-money movie-business exchange. Burns invested $400,000 and sent Keiser to the developers at Cambridge Technology Ventures, who finessed and expanded it, turning it into a robust fantasy market. The result was a completely self-sufficient platform for the creation of valuable predictive data but, sadly for users, completely useless wealth.

Then again, considering that this was the mid-’90s, that seemed as good an idea as any.

“When we saw that Blue Sky rules made it difficult to accomplish the trading aspect of it, we should’ve spent more time talking up the community aspect or even building it up as a MySpace-esque environment,” Burns says. Instead, what the company began leaning toward was a consumer portal that would be not just an advertising vehicle but a source of data as well. Movie studios, it should be noted, conduct an enormous amount of market research before dropping $50 million on a movie, and the kind of data HSX was collecting was a natural fit for that purpose: Which demographic groups are buying into which movies and which stars? What is the public interest in horror films? How much buzz is there about the new Judd Apatow flick?

Prediction markets, based on the premise that mob wisdom rules, place trust in groupthink [???] over the postulates of individual experts — and in this arena, HSX would prove to be a resounding success. Since 1998, HSX traders have chosen the top eight Academy Award category winners with 85 percent accuracy. Just this past February, a few days before it opened in theaters around the county, the HSX stock price of Eddie Murphy’s Norbit was climbing through the 70s, while Hannibal Rising was hovering in the 30s. Using a simple formula known to the industry (divide the HSX price by 2.5 and multiply by 1 million), it has been consistently proved possible to predict a film’s opening-weekend box office with a fair degree of precision. (A 2006 Harvard Business School study found HSX to be a relatively accurate online prediction market, finding its opening-weekend forecasts to be on target 77 percent of the time.) According to HSX, then, Norbit would open well north of $24 million and Hannibal at $12 million. Indeed, Norbit — despite withering, often vicious reviews — grossed $34 million and Hannibal $13 million.

Which, for what it’s worth, is a neat trick. But what, exactly, is it worth?

It’s an open secret that for the past few decades, Hollywood studios have used a trio of research companies — Nielsen National Research Group, Online Testing Exchange and MarketCast — to decide everything from cast mix and storylines to marketing strategies and release dates. Thus, while the HSX was initially greeted with interest, it quickly devolved into something of an online sideshow to the research world’s Big Three. The industry was logging on, but getting anyone to pay for the data was a struggle.

Complicating matters, perhaps surprisingly, was the site’s high visibility. By 1999, as dot-com hysteria dominated the cultural landscape, revolutionary hubris was running rampant and HSX was, in some ways, taunting the movie industry. Keiser began appearing on Entertainment Tonight offering weekly box-office predictions based on HSX trading performance. He was a frequent pundit on cable news programs and a thorn in the side of the studios who did not much appreciate the fact that this fast-talking stockbroker was tainting the public perception of their movies by loudly declaiming their prospects before they were even released. At one point, Keiser says, studios threatened to boycott ET; Keiser was pulled off the air. Still, Web traffic to HSX was increasing rapidly, and it wasn’t long before more than 70 investors — including Citigroup, NBC, Travelers Insurance, Keystone Venture Capital and, of all things, the Scandinavian Broadcast Service — had ponied up some $40 million to get a piece of HSX. And although Keiser and Burns were still enamored of the notion of building a real futures exchange, their new investors dismissed the idea outright; they were, instead, eyeing an IPO. HSX built up a staff of about 100, more than a third of them in public relations and marketing, and the company went to great lengths to generate awareness, drive traffic and boost ad dollars — the favored revenue model of the day.

“I was outvoted,” Keiser grumbles today. “It was gut-wrenching. The board bailed on me and my vision.”

Regardless, those were the good times. HSX moved into a former Herb Ritts Gallery office in West Hollywood that it thoroughly revamped. Andy Kaplan, a top Sony television executive, was installed as CEO. They hooked up that giant ticker. They threw lavish million-dollar parties, became fixtures at film festivals and blew still more millions on advertising. Asked what the company spent its $40 million on that could not be considered promotion, Keiser, who still holds onto his dream of someday democratizing media finance, shrugs: “Nothing I can think of.”

By then HSX was losing about $700,000 a month. By mid-2000, it had burned through $23 million in VC funding raised the previous year. And after the market crash eliminated the IPO exit strategy, HSX investors tried a back-door exit, linking up with a publicly traded pink-sheet company called Predict-It, another struggling fantasy market. On paper, the two companies could together claim revenue of about $10 million, but that figure was window dressing at best. Not long after plans for the pending merger were filed with regulators, Keiser and Burns checked out of the deal. Subsequently, the company’s 70 investors also backed out, refusing to put up more money to float the venture.

“Everyone was struggling, and we were all trying to climb onto something that would keep us afloat,” says former Predict-It CEO Andrew Merkatz. He has since formed a merchant banking firm, CountryRoad Capital. “Two drowning bodies grabbing onto each other does not make for a good ending.”

Then suddenly, in May 2001, with the Scandinavian Broadcast Service in control of the assets and apparently willing to write the last check, Cantor Fitzgerald stepped in to acquire the company.

“We had launched a sports-spread betting program in 2001 and had interest in diversifying what we offered, and they were cheap and not making money,” says Paul Galbraith, a spokesman for the Cantor Index in London. “But in the end, we never found a market for movie spreads in the U.K. With movies, there were just a couple of people who really knew what they were doing, and they had a lot more time on their hands for the entertainment futures market than our market makers did.”

Slight, presumably, intended.

To be fair, today’s HSX is, if nothing else, highly liquid for a prediction market. Since its inception 12 years ago, the exchange has created 1.7 million trading accounts and developed a sizable, cultlike following among movie fans. On an average day, 20,000 traders on the HSX will swap 2.5 billion shares in more than 40,000 trades, volume that dwarfs rival markets such as the Iowa Electronics Market and HedgeStreet. Compared to In-Trade, an Irish prediction exchange that offers markets in politics, commodities and other products, HSX is the NYSE: In seven years, In-Trade has created just 65,000 accounts, 12,000 of them active.

Still, there is one key difference that separates HSX from its competitors’ sites: money. Traders on the Iowa Exchange, In-Trade and HedgeStreet are all investing with actual currency. At HSX, the $9.9 billion in “Hollywood Dollars” accumulated by the current leader are about as valuable as a photocopy of a dollar bill. Meanwhile, the number of active accounts at HSX.com has dropped to 650,000, an audience too small for Nielsen Net Media to bother tracking.

Keiser (who voted his 10 million shares “no” to the sale) now insists that Cantor has not made good on the deal — which the firm made using eSpeed stock — leaving the original owners with nothing. He estimates the company has since spent close to $20 million developing the exchange software he created, but has not yet taken advantage of the asset the way everyone expected it to. A Cantor spokesman declined to comment on Keiser’s allegations.

The company does finally appear to be building on its prediction-market foothold: Earlier this year, it hired Andy Wing, formerly a Nielsen executive, to run a new division, Cantor Entertainment, with HSX as its centerpiece. Might HSX finally achieve legal exchange status? Consider that it took HedgeStreet two years to win its legal-exchange designation, then another 18 months to get it off the ground. Or that in 2005, In-Trade was fined and placed under tight restrictions regarding its U.S. activities, while the Iowa Exchange, a nonprofit and largely academic outfit, has been granted a “no action” waiver from the CFTC so it can operate in the U.S. without penalty.

As for the founders? Michael Burns, it is safe to say, landed on his feet. Having spent a decade brokering broadcast deals as an investment banker for Prudential Securities’ Los Angeles office, Burns had maintained strong ties with the entertainment business and was helping to build the independent studio Lions Gate Entertainment even as he was working on the HSX venture. Today, Burns is Lions Gate’s CEO.

Keiser, meanwhile, is still relishing his role as a rebel. Leaving both Wall Street and Hollywood in the dust, he spends most of his time in Paris producing films for the Al-Jazeera news network and heading up his latest venture, Kinooga.com. Kinooga, as Keiser explains, is the offspring of his original idea, providing a venue for individual buyers to finance independent media projects. “We’re creating a funding mechanism for independent producers to compete with the entrenched entertainment cartel,” he says. “This is an unregulated piece of business that gives many, many, many more people access to funds.”

As for Keiser and Burns’s original dream, that online Hollywood market that would turn John Q. Public into a mouse-wielding movie mogul? Consider that based on the $1 commissions now being earned by HedgeStreet, a trading business even merely the size of HSX today would generate $30 million a year in revenue. Cantor’s own spread-betting business in the U.K. is now earning $70 million in annual revenue, according to Galbraith. “Any way you slice it, the trading business far outstrips selling research,” Burns says. “I’d be very surprised if a futures exchange is not the business Cantor wants to get into. It just doesn’t make sense otherwise.”

This final scene, it seems, has yet to be written — for both the future of online futures markets and one trader’s crazy dream that simply refuses to die.

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Note: I have permission from the publisher to re-publish this news article. Thanks to Trader Daily. (Contact me.)

The original news article: Trader Daily ($$$)

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NEXT: Cantor Exchange

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Resident Publications:

[...] Wolfers predicted that cable news shows would turn to prediction-market experts for analysis in 2008. “My forecast is that they’ll either have someone in the studio whose job it is to track the markets, or the James Carvilles of the world will learn how to interpret the markets, and they’ll integrate that into their commentaries,” he said. [...]

I overlooked the “cable news shows” phrase, last time. Sorry for that. I had the three networks in mind (ABC, CBS, NBC). Also, I thought Justin Wolfers was talking about Election Day, specifically. (My initial thought: “no way”. Because of the leaking of raw polls that send false information to the traders.) He was talking about the whole “2008″ year, instead. I read that article too quickly, last time. I messed it.

MY SECOND THOUGHT: Yes, what he says seems reasonable and in line with what’s happening right now in the US business media. The real difficulty is the jump from the business media (which love markets) to the generalist media (which love polls).