Comments on: The Daily Dump – Oct 16

By: Yes We Can!

Yes We Can! — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 13:34:16 +0000

It’s great to see you’ve confirmed Old Timey Man is DOOMED!

By: Diogenes

Diogenes — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 02:16:25 +0000

Poss

Any chance the same could happen in Oz? Our betting markets are much smaller than the US and a lot more susceptible to “tinkering”. A few well placed bets by either side with one of the two big sites might create a “win expectation” for about $100,000, which you might even get to collect on. It’s quite possibly a better use of hidden contributions than laundering the money for advertising.

By: Possum

Possum — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 00:03:22 +0000

Doesn’t make me doubt it at all Dio. The money that the whole market has is always far far greater than the amount that any single player has, so when some group pushes up the price deliberately it only takes a few hours for any effect to be completely washed away by everyone elses money.

Trying to make narrative plays on Intrade is an exercise in impotence.

Though it does make it important for analysts to choose carefully the time they take snapshots of the numbers to analyse. Those deliberate price manipulations only last a few hours, so sometimes it’s a good idea to wait a couple of hours after they’ve washed out to get a true snapshot of Intrade prices and implied probabilities.

By: Diogenes

Diogenes — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 09:32:30 +0000

Possum

Does the verification that Intrade has been targetted and manipulated for political purposes make you doubt it’s “integrity” as a data source for punditry or are the amounts too small to corrupt the data?

By: mexicanbeemer

mexicanbeemer — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 06:18:37 +0000

I think Anthony Green is referring to seats within the Sydney area

By: ltep

ltep — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 00:24:01 +0000

Antony Green in his piece says:

“What is interesting on Saturday is that if the Liberal Party can win Ryde, it will be the first time the Liberal Party has taken a seat off the Labor Party in Sydney for two decades. Not since the election of the Greiner government in 1988 has the Liberal Party managed to dislodge a Labor MP from a seat the Labor Party held.”

Didn’t Labor lose Port Stephens to the Liberal Party at the last election?

By: Diogenes

Diogenes — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 22:47:15 +0000

You clever marsupial!

You and Nate were right.

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.

Over the past several weeks, the investor has pushed hundreds of thousands of dollars into one of Intrade’s predictive markets for the presidential election, the company said.

“The trading that caused the unusual price movements and discrepancies was principally due to a single ‘institutional’ member on Intrade,” said the company’s chief executive, John Delaney, in a statement released Thursday. “We have been in contact with the firm on a number of occasions. I have spoken to those involved personally.”

After the internal investigation into the trading patterns, Intrade found no wrongdoing or violation of its exchange rules, according to the company.

Trader Drove Up Price of McCain ‘Stock’ in Online Market
http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=5&docID=news-000002976265

By: scorge

scorge — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 04:31:47 +0000

Thanks for the Links poss. I’ll give the parliamentary research paper a close read.

By: Possum

Possum — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 09:58:28 +0000

Can’t remember that it was Ltep – although if some tool tried to trot that line out in defense of the Libs position last year it would have been laughable since the cell phone effect is mostly a function of age, and most young voters in Australia vote for the ALP and the Greens (in the same way that most young voters in the US are voting for the Dems)

By: ltep

ltep — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 09:29:40 +0000

Wasn’t the ‘cell phone effect’ tediously trotted out in our election campaign to explain the Libs poor polling?