Yearly Archives: 2008

Question to Caveat Bettor

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Cav,

In light of Robin Hanson&#8217-s latest blah blah blah&#8230-

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Do you really think that a prediction market journalist (or blogger) should disclose his/her event derivative holdings (as you do systematically)?&#8230-

Just a question that crossed my mind.

I was in favor of it before I read Hanson. Now, I have doubts&#8230- (Hanson, be damned. :-D )

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Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • POLLS VERSUS PREDICTION MARKETS: Justin Wolfers retorts to Bob Erikson.
  • Based on market data from a tiny prediction exchange (IEM, which is much smaller than InTrade-TradeSports or BetFair), a couple of researchers claim that prediction markets do not have superior predictive power. — And, adding salt to injury, they call our prediction market luminaries (Robin Hanson, Justin Wolfers, etc.)… “naive”.
  • Do the media avoid reporting the bad omens that is sometimes reflected in the prediction markets?
  • BetFair’s brand-new bet matching logic
  • Quizz Of The Day — Monday Morning Edition
  • BEWARE THE BLOGGING ACADEMICS: They are not blogging to inform us —they are blogging to promote themselves.
  • Did Jason Ruspini and friends cash in on huge moves in prices of oil, natural gas, coal and other parts of the energy patch, this semester?

TV News Shows = Entertainment

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The awful French TV program on sports betting (where BetFair&#8217-s Mark Davies croaked in French) reminded me of what Robert Scoble said about TV news shows.

They do not intend to educate you..

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Robert Scoble:

Last week I was on CNBC twice. Once on “Fast Money” and once on Donny Deutsch’s “The Big Idea.”

The Fast Money segment has been torn apart on the Internet but Roger Ehrenberg of the Information Arbitrage blog had the most intelligent analysis of it.

Here’s the key piece of the Donny Deutsch show, where we had a bunch of bloggers on the Microsoft Blogger Bus asking questions of Bug Labs’ CEO Peter Semmelhack. Bug Labs went onto win CNET’s “Best of CES” award for the emerging tech category.

Some things that are worth underlying about the difference between my video show and CNBC.

1. Expense. CNBC had dozens of people involved in the show, a huge booth, really expensive cameras, satellite time, etc. My show? Get a Nokia phone and go for it.
2. Makeup. Yeah, I wore it. There’s a video out there on the Internet somewhere. I’m not sure why Valleywag hasn’t found it yet.
3. You don’t get to say whatever you want. Donny’s show was tape delayed. If you try doing something wacky, they’ll just cut you out. But even if they keep you on, they have a director who is telling you what they want. She preps you for each segment, giving you “talking points.” If you don’t agree with those talking points you have to negotiate to have them changed. But if they don’t like your talking points they just won’t go with you. Second, she has a big sign and if she thinks you should make a point she makes it clear.
4. These shows are NOT about getting deep, or really getting a good understanding of CES. They were ALL about being entertaining! Hey, who knew? (I tried to pull a bunch of gadgets out and they said “we don’t care about the gadgets.”)
5. They filmed Bug Labs’ CEO for 10 hours for a two-minute segment. Now do you understand why so many CEOs let me come over and film them? I never take more than an hour with an executive, so it’s always easy to get onto someone’s schedule.
6. My show has very little editing, so it’s pretty rare that the context gets lost on an answer. On TV, though, things get cut up, sliced and diced, all for entertainment effect, not necessarily to tell the best story.

VIDEO – BetFairs Mark Davies croaks like a frog.

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To watch Mark Davies speaking French:

  1. Internet Explorer &#8212-no FireFox.
  2. Latest Flash.
  3. Go to M6 Replay.
  4. Select &#8220-magazines&#8221-.
  5. Scroll on the right to go to &#8220-Enquete Exclusive&#8221-.
  6. Select Sunday, May 1, 2008 &#8212- Paris sportifs: Quand la Mafia s&#8217-en mele&#8230-
  7. Windows Media.
  8. 9:00 into, they talk about Davydenko.
  9. 11:00 into, they show the BetFair HQ.
  10. Mark Davies is introduced as &#8220-the #2&#8243-. And, later on, they mis-translate &#8220-Managing Director&#8221- into &#8220-Directeur General&#8221-, which means &#8220-CEO&#8221- in French. Let&#8217-s hope David Yu won&#8217-t watch that tape. :-D
  11. His French is not superb&#8230- but quite close to. :-D
  12. Explains that, in the Davydenko match, it was the bets that lead the game &#8212-not the other way around. So, BetFair voided all bets.
  13. I am realizing that the phrase &#8220-the prices of the bets&#8221- (&#8221-les prix des paris&#8220-) is not usable. Better to talk about probabilities to the public.
  14. The rest of that news report is devoted to demonstrating, thru innuendos, rumors, unfounded pseudo facts, and mis-reported true facts, that the Mafia is in control of all world sports &#8212-thru world-wide betting.
  15. At the very end, though, one official (from the tennis federation, the ATP, if my memory is correct) says that they cooperate with some betting operators to stop corruption.

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M6 – Enquete Exclusive – Sunday, June 1, 2008 &#8212- Paris sportifs: Quand la Mafia s&#8217-en mele&#8230- &#8211- [Sports bets: When the Mafia gets involved…]

1.6 million French people watched that TV show.

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Bo Cowgills boss = Hal Varian

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UPDATE: Bo tells us: &#8220-Actually, that’s my desk right behind him, in the top picture.&#8221-

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Using Prediction Markets to Track Information Flows: Evidence from Google – (PDF file – PDF file) – by Bo Cowgill, Justin Wolfers, and Eric Zitwewitz – 2008-01-06

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Blip.TV –

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Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • POLLS VERSUS PREDICTION MARKETS: Justin Wolfers retorts to Bob Erikson.
  • Based on market data from a tiny prediction exchange (IEM, which is much smaller than InTrade-TradeSports or BetFair), a couple of researchers claim that prediction markets do not have superior predictive power. — And, adding salt to injury, they call our prediction market luminaries (Robin Hanson, Justin Wolfers, etc.)… “naive”.
  • Do the media avoid reporting the bad omens that is sometimes reflected in the prediction markets?
  • BetFair’s brand-new bet matching logic
  • Quizz Of The Day — Monday Morning Edition
  • BEWARE THE BLOGGING ACADEMICS: They are not blogging to inform us —they are blogging to promote themselves.
  • Did Jason Ruspini and friends cash in on huge moves in prices of oil, natural gas, coal and other parts of the energy patch, this semester?

PREDICTION MARKETS HAVE ARRIVED: Bloomberg columnist shames Indias government FOR NOT USING prediction markets to forecast demand.

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WOW. This is big.

Andy Mukherjee:

[…] Finally, demand estimation is too important to be left entirely to experts.

Companies such as Google Inc. are harnessing the power of prediction markets &#8212- which gather information from a large number of participants &#8212- to generate useful forecasts.

There&#8217-s no reason why governments can&#8217-t do the same.

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Great idea.

Let&#8217-s shame the 95% of Fortune-500 companies for not using enterprise prediction markets. :-D

  • Shame on you, McDonald&#8217-s, for not using enterprise prediction markets.
  • Shame on you, Nike, for not using enterprise prediction markets.
  • Shame on you, Conquest Capital, for not using enterprise prediction markets.
  • etc. etc. etc. :-D

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Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • Midas Oracle is only 6 times smaller than Fred Wilson’s blog, “A VC”.
  • The best blogs on prediction markets
  • The New Republic profiles the next Vice President of the United States of America —Jim Webb, maybe.
  • No Trades (other than at the start) —-> Not a reliable predictor, as of today
  • How you should read Midas Oracle
  • The best prediction exchanges
  • “There will be no media consumption left in ten years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.”

The Wikipedia entry on prediction markets looks like a messy Marrakesh bazaar. – Shame on all members of the field of prediction markets -including the author of this present, finger-wagging post.

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The Wikipedia entry on prediction markets does not seem to be well maintained.

Here are the warnings that welcome visitors. The first of the 2 warnings has been up since November 2007 &#8212-that&#8217-s 7 months ago!!!!!!

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And the definition opens on the big myth, create by IEM, and perpetuated by some scholars:

Prediction markets are speculative markets created for the purpose of making predictions.

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It&#8217-s a big myth.

The TradeSports and BetFair prediction markets were primarily created to satisfy the traders &#8212-their predictions come as an interesting offspring.

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Is Big Brother being fixed in Great Britain? And are the alleged fixers using BetFair to make a fast buck (or quid, as they say in the U.K.)?

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Via Ed, The Daily Mail:

The Daily Star reveals that some punters are set to earn more than half a million pounds after a total bet of ?971 was staked via BetFair on Nikki to win at 1000-1 shortly after she was voted out of the house. […]

Rumours of &#8216-insider dealing&#8217- on BetFair chat forums continue to surround the clued up gamblers who stand to win ?582,250. […]

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That &#8220-Nikki&#8221- was evicted, an later on re-instated in the game.

Hence, the questions about the traders who did bet on her, after her eviction. Did they &#8220-know&#8221- something that the other traders didn&#8217-t?

On the other hand, it&#8217-s a constitutional right for Joe A. Doe to bet ?971 on a loser. Many do that every day at the horse race track. We should not accuse people of insider trading (or corruption) without any evidence.

BetFair employs many specialists in their &#8220-integrity team&#8221- to deal with such occurrences.

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VIDEO – Robotic Mule

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Nigel, you should set up some kind of prediction market about that at HubDub.

Amazing.

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Via the ultra-interesting Robin Hanson &#8212-who, for once, does not write a soporific post.

Un-Important Technical Note: The video above is dated 2008, while Robin Hanson links to a 2006 video, in his post.

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Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • This is why I said that those who believe that Hillary Clinton has a chance to be on the Democratic ticket are “clueless”.
  • WEB EXCLUSIVE: — The annoted, historical, compound chart that those triple morons at the BetFair blog are hiding from their readers’ view. — It is located in a secret cache, linked to behind a picture of Hillary Clinton. — Curious place to locate a prediction market chart. — I bet nobody downloaded that chart. —
  • Knows the similarity between Google, Craig’s List, and the Drudge Report?
  • “Listening to each other is core to our culture, and we don’t listen to each other just because we’re all so smart. We listen because everyone has good ideas, and because it’s a great way to show respect. And any company, at any point in its history, can start listening more.”
  • 2 days after my ringing the alarm bell… THE FREE FALL
  • Tech News Of The Day — Friday Morning Edition
  • VIDEO: Why Hillary Clinton will never be the Vice President of the United States of America.

PREDICTION MARKET TECHNOLOGY NOT IN GARTNERS TOP 10 TECHNOLOGIES LIST

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Via Jim Anderson

Gartner:

1. Multicore and hybrid processors
2. Virtualization and fabric computing
3. Social networks and social software
4. Cloud computing and cloud/Web platforms
5. Web mashups
6. User Interface
7. Ubiquitous computing
8. Contextual computing
9. Augmented reality
10. Semantics

Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • WEB EXCLUSIVE: — The annoted, historical, compound chart that those triple morons at the BetFair blog are hiding from their readers’ view. — It is located in a secret cache, linked to behind a picture of Hillary Clinton. — Curious place to locate a prediction market chart. — I bet nobody downloaded that chart. —
  • Knows the similarity between Google, Craig’s List, and the Drudge Report?
  • “Listening to each other is core to our culture, and we don’t listen to each other just because we’re all so smart. We listen because everyone has good ideas, and because it’s a great way to show respect. And any company, at any point in its history, can start listening more.”
  • 2 days after my ringing the alarm bell… THE FREE FALL
  • Tech News Of The Day — Friday Morning Edition
  • VIDEO: Why Hillary Clinton will never be the Vice President of the United States of America.
  • Any idea what Brad Stewart means with that logo that features a south-to-north rotation? — Does he want to put our Planet Earth upside down? — The real rotation occurs around an axis that connects the north and the south poles.