Comments on: Intrade Monday – That Moose is Cooked Edition

By: Possum

Possum — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 22:02:55 +0000

I finished reading that very artcile just 5 minutes ago Ecky! The trades were from some “institutional investor” – read; foundation or company. Read; Some outfit with Republican links making a narrative play.

I’ll be writing something about this tomorrow or Monday if I can just find where I stored all the screengrabs of this trader pissing hundreds of thousands of dollars up the wall.

By: ecky

ecky — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 21:58:32 +0000

Poss, some time back you wrote a lengthy piece in the comments of Nate Silver’s 538.com suggesting that looking at individual State Intrade market activity was a more accurate way of viewing the Big Picture. Furthur, you pointed to evidence of someone playing “silly buggers” with the Intrade BHO V JMc market.
Don’t believe Mr. Silver replied (he’s a busy man ‘n’ all) but it turns out that all the “silly buggers” was coming from one li’l ol’ source not tangential to the centre of McCain’s campaign.
Wonder if Nate, who made his name analyzing baseball stats, would have let something like this go through to the catcher?

Ripple Effects
Intrade users first noticed something amiss when a series of large purchases running counter to market predictions sparked volatility in the prices of John McCain and Barack Obama contracts.
An internal investigation by the popular online market Intrade has revealed that an investor’s purchases prompted “unusual” price swings that boosted the prediction that Sen. John McCain will become president.

http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=5&docID=news-000002976265

By: PASOK

PASOK — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 13:48:42 +0000

Speaking of Chinese philosophies and the like, I got out my copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.

I can’t help but feel that the following applied to the US is appropriate:

“When General McCain, unable to estimate the enemy’s strength, allows an inferior GOP force to engage the Democratic one, or hurls a weak detachment against a powerful one, and neglects to place picked soldiers in the front rank, the result must be rout.”

There are plenty of other signs that could be applied from Sun Tzu, just as I am sure Lu Kewen Rudd did with his campaign.

By: Greensborough Growler

Greensborough Growler — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 10:21:55 +0000

Possum,

There’s an old Chinese saying, “When the fat man gets thinnner, the thin man disappears”.

The snake oil salesmen and hucksters have disappeared for the time being. But, they’ll be back when the times suit. In the meantime a lot of people are going to be scratching around for a living.

If you think the new commercial paradigm is going to be much different to the past, history says you will be disappointed

By: Possum

Possum — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 04:58:31 +0000

Yep – it’s over on this site on the Contact page too.

By: ecky

ecky — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 04:51:31 +0000

Poss, are you still contactable via the email addy on your old site? Have info re the wi-fi for Nov. 5 if you want to suss signal strenth etc. prior to E-Day?

By: Dan

Dan — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 04:48:57 +0000

There’s pretty solid debunking of the Bradley effect over at 538:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/10/if-bradley-effect-is-gone-what-happened.html
Particularly interesting when you look at the understatement of the obama numbers in the dem primary. Then again the dem demographic (ha ha) is probably not as conducive to producing it than a general population sample. Don’t have any numbers for that, but if it’s not an issue I suppose it doesn’t matter.

Pollyanna – I’m not an expert here by any means, but ordinarily if there was a direct relationship between the x and y axis (the markets and the polls) you’d see a straight diagonal line across the graph (as one goes up the other does equally). The reason it plateaus at the top and bottom, producing that S shape, is because once the polling numbers reach a certain level (you can see this around the 15-point mark) people betting on the outcome of the state are acknowledging that there is basically no chance of one party or the other winning. So knowing that punters know that, you’d expect it to look kind of like that as a line of best fit. I was just surprised that there was such a big variation of the markets for states on the same polling margin, but poss has shed some light @6.

By: Possum

Possum — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 02:50:16 +0000

Electing a Republican is good for some businessmen on Wall Street certainly – but looking back over Bush Mk1, Clinton and Bush Mk 2, well one of them is not like the others in terms of running a successful economic policy!

Surely we’ve realised by now that what’s good for Wall Street pay packets isn’t the same as what is good for the real economy, a real economy that equity markets were once far more anchored to than they are today – a situation that will probably return quicker than most of us think.

By: Greensborough Growler

Greensborough Growler — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 02:34:53 +0000

So, in conclusion you agree that electing a Republican is good for business and will solve the financial market meltdown?

Is this the answer to your “World Peace” question? Just asking?

By: Possum

Possum — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 02:17:57 +0000

That’s good Greeny!

It’s not too dissimilar to Bush and the S&P last election:
http://possumcomitatus.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/wolfersetal.jpg

Wall Street knows that its bread is distinctly Republican buttered.