Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) would free our prediction markets.

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Ron Paul - Meet The Press

December 23, 2007: Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) – Meet the Press – TRANSCRIPT

VIDEO: MP4 – WMV

AUDIO: MP3

Hurry up to download the video or audio file(s) above. Will stay up on their website only for one week.

YouTube: #1 – #2 – #3 – #4

HAPPY HOLIDAY, HAPPY CHRISTMAS, HAPPY HANUKKAH AND HAPPY FESTIVUS TO ALL OF OUR MIDAS ORACLE READERS AND AUTHORS.

&#8212-

UPDATE: Robin Hanson comments&#8230-

This transcript says nothing about prediction markets. A president Paul might do many things that required only an executive order, but other things would require the cooperation of Congress. A presidential executive order could not overturn CFTC, SEC or state gambling legislation. He could approve government prediction markets, such as the Policy Analysis Market, that might well be seen as immune to these other regulations. But given everything else he&#8217-d be trying to do, I&#8217-m not sure when he&#8217-d get around to this.

Midas Oracle = posting + commenting… on prediction markets

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by Lonni Sue Johnson

Read the previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • Michael Gerber – The E-Myth Revisited
  • Changes to TradeFair prediction markets
  • Eric Zitzewitz, laughing all the way to the bank
  • Michael Bloomberg: I’m not running… but, beware, I am a King maker.
  • Meet the 3 Iowa Electronic Markets co-founders: George Neumann, Forrest Nelson and Robert Forsythe.
  • When Markets Beat The Polls – Scientific American Magazine
  • GLOBAL COOLING

Why InTrade-TradeSports and BetFair-TradeFair need to set up a corporate blog

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No GravatarRobert Scobble&#8217-s book co-author interviewing the Dell Computer blogger:

[QUESTION] 5. Can you give me some statistics on the blog? How many uniques? How many comments? Growth?

[ANSWER:] We’ve been tracking at about 1 million page views per week. Unique visitors have reached as high as 300,000 per month.

One of the most important metrics is the change in the tonality of the conversations. In 2006, at the low point, almost 50% of the conversations about Dell were negative. Today, we are at about 23%. I don’t attribute all that success to our digital media initiatives, but it’s clear that they have accounted for part of it.

[QUESTION] 6. As you know, many enterprise decision makers are fearful of being shouted at [*], lack of adequate measurement tools, loss of message control, leaking secrets and of course&#8211-no clear ROI. How would you address each of these?

[ANSWER:] I think all of those issues are reasons why corporations stay away from joining conversations. I would argue though that the benefits of being part of the conversation outweigh all the risks. In my view, it’s really about facing the reality of the changes that are happening in front of us. Companies need to admit that control is shifting toward customers. More and more customers are talking about companies they either like or dislike. Those conversations happen with or without companies being actively involved. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that those conversations have more influence over perception than much of the marketing material and PR messages that companies produce.

We wrestle with measurement tools and ROI all the time for a couple of reasons:
– This is a new, but maturing field, and that means it will take time to develop tools and metrics that mean something on a broad scale
– Proving ROI in social media almost always involves looking at a topic over an extended period of time

In my view though, the real value in social media is that it has the potential to change customer perception in ways that just weren’t possible before. Just because that’s hard to measure doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. Time will tell, but it seems to me that not being part of the conversation is a far riskier proposition.

[*]

Read the previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • Michael Gerber – The E-Myth Revisited
  • Changes to TradeFair prediction markets
  • Eric Zitzewitz, laughing all the way to the bank
  • Michael Bloomberg: I’m not running… but, beware, I am a King maker.
  • Meet the 3 Iowa Electronic Markets co-founders: George Neumann, Forrest Nelson and Robert Forsythe.
  • When Markets Beat The Polls – Scientific American Magazine
  • GLOBAL COOLING

Leading capitals of the world: BetFair-TradeFair HQs location ranks #1.

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Leading Capitals of the World

Author Profile&nbsp-Editor and Publisher of Midas Oracle .ORG .NET .COM &#8212- Chris Masse&#8217-s mugshot &#8212- Contact Chris Masse &#8212- Chris Masse&#8217-s LinkedIn profile &#8212- Chris Masse&#8217-s FaceBook profile &#8212- Chris Masse&#8217-s Google profile &#8212- Sophia-Antipolis, France, E.U. Read more from this author&#8230-

Read the previous blog posts by Chris. F. Masse:

  • the yellow sphere = a cobalt atom
  • In spite of their inherent complexity, Jason Ruspini’s tax rate prediction markets show some liquidity.
  • Shoot Down USA-193. Mission Accomplished.
  • Too early to call David Pennock’s prediction markets a nuclear disaster
  • The green area in this NASA image shows a plankton bloom in Lake Titicaca in South America.
  • SCANDAL: BetFair Poker signs up a convicted cheater.
  • The End of NYC’s Off-Track Betting

Bet2Give on CNBC: High impacting media infiltration

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No GravatarCNBC – The Closing Bell – Maria Bartiromo interviewed NewsFutures&#8217- Norris Clark about Bet2Give and about NewsFutures&#8217- enterprise prediction markets. It was great. Great.

The Video – The Video

If Emile Servan-Schreiber or Norris Clark put the video on YouTube, I will embed it in a blog post on Midas Oracle. And if they send me the transcript, I will publish it. It was great. The visuals were great &#8212-like slides. Very good. We&#8217-re making progress, folks.

Some remarks: I didn&#8217-t like that Norris Clark defined Bet2Give as a &#8220-prediction market&#8220-, as opposed to a prediction exchange. And I object about talking about a &#8220-stock market of future events&#8221-. It&#8217-s a derivative exchange for future events, rather.

Bet2Give on CNBC

UPDATE: NewsFutures CEO Emile Servan-Schreiber comments&#8230-

This &#8220-Sinning &amp- Winning&#8221- tag line below the screen is very strange, since Bet2Give is explicitly about neither. It goes to show how deeply the association between betting and sinning is rooted in the American psyche. By that measure, we&#8217-ve got a looooong way to go still before widespread acceptance of PMs [= prediction markets], not to mention legalization.

Read the previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • Michael Gerber – The E-Myth Revisited
  • Changes to TradeFair prediction markets
  • Eric Zitzewitz, laughing all the way to the bank
  • Michael Bloomberg: I’m not running… but, beware, I am a King maker.
  • Meet the 3 Iowa Electronic Markets co-founders: George Neumann, Forrest Nelson and Robert Forsythe.
  • When Markets Beat The Polls – Scientific American Magazine
  • GLOBAL COOLING

Please, make WordPress a bit like Wikipedia.

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Folks, here is my proposal to the WordPress developers:

Assign a great number of editors to some specific pages

Right now, if you are an editor in WordPress, you can edit any posts and pages. Hence, the administrator of a big group blog would not have many editors &#8212-because the blog posters would not like the idea that their colleagues can edit their posts.

But it would be great to be able to have a great number of editors for some specific pages. That way, any group blog powered by WordPress would be able to tap in the &#8220-wisdom of crowds&#8221- (see James Surowiecki book by the same name) &#8212-the same way Wikipedia does. For more on Wikipedia, see these two posts.

Collective intelligence (a.k.a. wisdom of crowds) is a mechanism at the heart of Google PageRank, Wikipedia, open-source software, prediction markets, etc. It is very powerful. WordPress could tap into that very easily, by allowing a page-by-page editing role.

The WP admin would set who are the editor(s) of a particular page &#8212-one registered person, two, a bunch of blog authors&#8230- or any internet citizens like in Wikipedia.

Thanks a lot for your attention. Contact me for more info, or leave a comment below.

NEXT: WordPress is a bit like WikiMedia (the software powering Wikipedia), now.

Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • The definitive proof that FOR-PROFIT prediction exchanges (like BetFair and InTrade) are the best organizers of socially valuable prediction markets (like those on global warming and climate change).
  • Fairness Doctrine prediction markets
  • 2 MILLION TRADES LATER: Inkling’s play-money prediction markets are accurate —too.
  • Web Forums on Prediction Markets
  • Jason Ruspini will answer SOME of these CFTC questions. — 12 days left, Jason.
  • QUIZZ OF THE DAY: Which blog is the most open minded?
  • Prediction Markets TV — Will the controversial but indispensable Max Keiser (ex-HSX) stay true to his purpose, or will he f*** it up?

Amateur Journalists (Bloggers) Vs. Professional Journalists (Media) Vs. Wisdom Of Crowds & Collective Intelligence (Wikipedia)

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And the wisdom of crowds won, of course. That&#8217-s the conclusion I draw from reading Rogers Cadenhead at WorkBench, who assessed what would be the settlement of the LongBets wager on:

In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times&#8217- Web site.

AGREE
Dave Winer

Stakes
$2,000
($1,000 each)

DISAGREE
Martin Nisenholtz

For Rogers Cadenhead, Dave Winer will win the bet. But he also says that the overall winner is&#8230- WIKIPEDIA.

[…] So Winer wins the bet 3-2, but his premise of blog triumphalism is challenged by the fact that on all five stories, a major U.S. media outlet ranks above the leading weblog in Google search. Also, the results for the top story of the year reflect poorly on both sides. In the five years since the bet was made, a clear winner did emerge, but it was neither blogs nor the Times. Wikipedia, which was only one year old in 2002, ranks higher today on four of the five news stories: 12th for Chinese exports, fifth for oil prices, first for the Iraq war, fourth for the mortgage crisis and first for the Virginia Tech killings. Winer predicted a news environment &#8220-changed so thoroughly that informed people will look to amateurs they trust for the information they want.&#8221- Nisenholtz expected the professional media to remain the authoritative source for &#8220-unbiased, accurate, and coherent&#8221- information. Instead, our most trusted source on the biggest news stories of 2007 is a horde of nameless, faceless amateurs who are not required to prove expertise in the subjects they cover.

So the real winner is Wikipedia &#8212-a news and knowledge aggregator&#8230- using anonymous volunteers. But Wikipedia is only an information aggregator&#8230- it feeds on both media and blogs to gather the facts. Wikipedia is the common denominator of knowledge &#8212-not the primary source of reporting. Just like prediction markets feed on polls and other advanced indicators.

External Link: See a previous assessment of the bet by Jason Kottke.

NEXT: Amateur Experts (Yahoo! Answers) Vs. Wisdom Of Crowds &amp- Collective Intelligence (Wikipedia)

UPDATE: An empty comment from Read &#038- Write Web.

The market moved but is it news?

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In financial markets there is strong evidence to suggest that news gets priced into markets within 15 minutes of its release and sometimes even more quickly. Recent research into prediction markets suggests that they aren’t nearly as efficient with researchers from University of Pennsylvania showing that prices on IEM can be predicted using public news flow.

Doing a simple analysis of some the key events in the 2008 Presidential Elections against prices on Intrade shows that on discrete events there is a clear relationship between prices and news flow. However over longer periods the relationship is not always clear.

On the 4th of March CBS announced the results of a straw poll conducted at the conservative PAC convention in Washington DC. They picked Romney as their favourite. Romney’s price on Intrade lifted immediately where it stayed for about a week.

Romney price

On the 11th of April the Fred Thompson revealed on Fox News and ABC Radio that he had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma nearly three years prior. The New York Times and other publications picked up the story the next day. Looking at his price chart shows he opened on the 12th of April at 19 but then closed at 15. The next day he opened at 11.2 but then closed at 17, as the story died down.

Thompson price

In both these cases, the news stories the media considered to be the important ones correspond with the news flow that traders thought was important.

However, the most interesting market movement of the year must be the Obama August slide. On the first of August Obama opened on Intrade at 35.5 but by the 24th of that month he had slide to 17.2. He continued sliding hitting a rock bottom of 10.7 on the 14th of October.

Obama price

The question is what was the news flow on Obama from the 1st of August to the 24th of August? Analysing the news articles in the New York Times suggests a disconnect between what was reported and how the market was reacting. Obama started August badly with a bungled comment on use of nuclear weapons.

Additionally, his continued line that stabilisation of Iraq had been a ‘complete failure’ may also have cost him some points.

However in sum these news items don’t seem to correlate with an 18 point slide. This could lead us to two possible conclusions:

  1. The New York Times didn’t report the most market sensitive news affecting Obama in August
  2. Obama was over-sold in August and his price did not reflect his true value

Cross-posted from the Hubdub blog.

Finally, someone tells the libertarian truth on the US ban against Internet betting and gambling.

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Reason Magazine blog (who else?):

It&#8217-s too bad Europe, Japan, and Canada caved. Here&#8217-s hoping little Antigua stays plucky.

A few observations:

First, and most obviously, the U.S. government is so hellbent on policing the online habits of its citizens, it&#8217-s willing to pay what will likely be tens of billions of dollars of money in trade reparations—taken from same said U.S. citizens in tax receipts—to maintain its dumb ban on consensual online wagering.

Second, the U.S. could have resolved all of this and preserved its precious gambling prohibition by simply making the prohibition uniform. But that wouldn&#8217-t do. Just as important as the ban on Internet gambling itself were the carve-outs for politically-protected special interest groups. Think state lotteries, or the horse racing industry, which has over the years given generously to the campaigns of people like Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell and Virginia Rep. Bob Goodlatte, who decry the immorality of online poker while also supporting carveouts for the ponies. So the tens of billions the U.S. government is paying to settle the trade dispute is not only to preserve the gambling ban, it&#8217-s to preserve the congressionally-granted monopoly on online wagering for interests with more political clout than poker players.

Finally, U.S. Trade Office flack Gretchen Hamel apparently told Reuters she &#8220-isn&#8217-t going to get into&#8221- the terms of the settlement. Pardon? Is the settlement not being paid with public funds? Aren&#8217-t the people who negotiated the settlement employees of the U.S. government? On what grounds does the U.S. Trade Office feel it&#8217-s entitled to withhold this information?

Previously: The European Commission dealt a blow to European online gaming companies Monday when it accepted a U.S. offer of openings in other sectors as compensation for closing the U.S. gambling market to foreign firms.

Author Profile&nbsp-Editor and Publisher of Midas Oracle .ORG .NET .COM &#8212- Chris Masse&#8217-s mugshot &#8212- Contact Chris Masse &#8212- Chris Masse&#8217-s LinkedIn profile &#8212- Chris Masse&#8217-s FaceBook profile &#8212- Chris Masse&#8217-s Google profile &#8212- Sophia-Antipolis, France, E.U. Read more from this author&#8230-

Read the previous blog posts by Chris. F. Masse:

  • Are David Pennock’s search engine prediction markets the worst marketing disaster since the New Coke?
  • Midas Oracle is incontestably [*] the best vertical portal to prediction markets.
  • Comment spam paid by Emile Servan-Schreiber of NewsFutures-Bet2Give
  • BetFair Games needs a Swedish provider to develop its gambling offerings.
  • When Markets Beat the Polls – Scientific American Magazine
  • Robin Hanson has some fanboy in India. Great. Tiny caveat: The parroting Indian writer does not acknowledge Robin Hanson by name.
  • Molecular Nanotechnology

That blog webmaster doesnt have the first clue about web publishing.

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  • The Top 6 Ways Not To Get Pulled Over
  • How to Handle Getting Pulled Over Without Losing Your Cool
  • Top Five Cop Tricks – How They Get You to Give Up Your Rights
  • Avoiding the Section 1001 Trap – Why You Always Need A Lawyer

Nowhere in those four excellent law articles can you spot the name of the smart author who penned them: STEVE &#8220-Mister Just&#8221- ROMAN.

The BetFair blog (Betting @ BetFair) and the InTrade &#8220-bulletin&#8221- suffer from the same flaw &#8212-and many others, alas.

On Midas Oracle, our blog authors are listed, counted, evaluated, and their damn name do appear in the signature line of their blog posts &#8212-including when the blog posts are viewed within a feed reader (like Google Reader or BlogLines). Plus, on Midas Oracle, copyright is retained by each author. And cross-posting (with a deep link to the original content) is accepted.