Previously:

- Paul Krugman Tries to Foist Specious Argument in Tobin Tax Debate.

- Jason Ruspini is against the Tobin Tax.

App Engine Java Code

By mister the great research scientist doctor professor Panos Ipeirotis

Every sub-millisecond counts for our customers. They need to be able to pull a price, if the market moves, in order to reduce the risk and allow them to run the spread tighter. Also, algorithmic traders want the lowest latency, so they can see a price [change] and spot the difference, in order to take the price.

TradeFair

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Our good friend Barry Ritholtz.has persuaded himself that our real-money prediction markets suffer from an irremediable and fatal problem: liquidity on political event derivative markets is too thin for smart Wall Street people like him to take their market-generated probabilities seriously. Barry Ritholtz is keen to tout oranges–apples comparisons: the NYSE volume versus the Obama–Clinton volume at InTrade. It’s a bullshit argument, but he managed to persuade some gullible journalists writing for some clueless mainstream media that thin liquidity was responsible for the New Hampshire upset —and else.

Barry, if you had 1,000,000,000 trades on the New Hampshire prediction market, you’d still have an inaccurate prediction. The polls were wrong, and there’s nothing … NOTHING… that the InTrade and BetFair traders could have done to get this election right. Get over it, Barry. Traders are not magicians.

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[For why the polls were wrong, see: The New York Times, Zogby, Rasmussen, Gallup...]

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