But just for you Dr Carr, I’ve saved your eyeballs from any further assault.

Possum had better hope Apostrophe Man doesn’t see this atrocity.

At this time in 2004, they were only 2 States out from the eventual result. A few weeks before E-Day that dropped down to being 1 State out (but remember, for a few hours on one day a State might move from one column into another before the weight of market money moves it back into it’s regular column). So they’re pretty much good to go from here on in.

Thewetmale,
Glad you enjoy. If you ever have any questions, please feel free to ask. That’s what this place is about – trying to make the complicated not so complicated.

Steve,
Don’t get me wrong, I think Nate Silver of 538 is brilliant and he’s certainly my favourite US polling analysis site. He was right in that some Intrade markets are dodgy – he was wrong to suggest that Intrade is dodgy as a result, because he made the mistake of using the wrong Intrade market for analysis.

At Intrade, there’s actually four markets that you can bet on over “who will win the US election”.

The first and most popular market is the Contender markets – the Individual as Winner markets where you can can not only bet on McCain and Obama, but also Clinton, Romney, Gore etc. 18 candidates can be bet on all up.

The second is on which Political Party will win the Presidency.

The third market is the collection of State markets – which party will win which State

The fourth market is the “pick the number of electoral college votes for each party” market.

That first market – the contender market – ceased to be functional and relevant after the nominations for the Democrats and Republicans were sown up. Now, it’s mostly filled with newbie punters and people trying to recoup their losses on earlier contracts. For instance, there was a lot of “Clinton as winner” money floating around in this market and there still is. After election day, all the people that backed Clinton will have to pay up. But Clinton can still be traded, so people seem to have packaged up a series of bets and betting volumes that they initiate at the same time (not too dissimilar to what an Intrade derivative package might look like) with the hope of manipulating the market price for a few hours and reducing the size of the losses they are holding on Clinton. Not by much, but by a few dollars here and a few dollars there every time they game the system.

That’s what Nate picked up on – but that market hasn’t been a serious market for months and isn’t worth paying serious attention to. I’m surprised he used that as a broad representation of Intrade because no one with any serious knowledge of prediction markets or statistical nous ever uses that market for anything!

If the Political Party as Presidential Winner market was a 4000 sample national poll run by a reputable pollster, the Contender markets would be the equivalent of a tabloid newspaper running an online poll on the front of their website.

The Political Party as Winner market is the headline market where the real action is (although still slightly skewed by the Contender market results washing into it a bit).We don’t see anywhere near the blatant gaming attempts in this market that we see in the Contender markets – yet even when they do pop up, their results get washed out of the system usually within the hour.

It’s also worth mentioning here that to manipulate Intrade to any level that makes a real, sustained difference in price and implied probabilities would cost vast sums of money. Vast sums of money. But the more it was attempted to be obviously manipulated, the more people would jump in to invest in that “free money” that would be floating around.

To get the most out of Intrade info – dont look at the Contender markets because they’re legacy markets. Look at the Political Party and State markets instead.

Hope they work.

Caf – I’m actually hoarding as much Intrade data about this election as I can get my hands on, including all the different simulation results with the aim to create a few Intrade blueprints for dealing with uncertainty in the future.