Intrade scammed
 

Someone's trying to drive up the price of McCain's stock on Intrade. Big surprise.
I wonder why it took so long for something like this to come up. It's an obvious & inherent disadvantage of a predictions market.


Intrade scammed

WTF!?!

Obama's beating McCain on this site by nearly 80%. If this story's true at all wouldn't McCain be beating Obama?

Note that McC does much better on Intrade than he does on fivethirtyeight.com . I don't really care about that; i'm more interested in the hype about a pseudo-market a magical door to The Truth.

The genius of Intrade was marketing a book making venture as a "market".

I still don't get it, if McCain's people or supporters are cheating wouldn't they at least be close?

Seems pretty stupid but it doesn't seem illegal. If people are watching this market and supposedly using it to forecast the winner, and one person/entity can have this much of an influence on it, I see more of a problem with the market than with the actions of the individual/entity. IMO the author is showing his bias

The market actually corrects itself quiet quickly. This person inflates the price, everyone else sees it is inflated and buys shares causing his price to drop.

I'm taking a 100 timer on McCain ($500 for all you non-gambling types), odds are sweet, win $800 atm. If he loses, oh well it will cost me more with the big 3, if Obama wins.

why not just buy obama (sorry, i trade options for a living, we tend to go with probabilities of profit and not look for the high risk, high reward payoff)

My dad, huge 49'ers fan, put a few hundred on the opposing team in the Superbowl one year. After seeing the tickets, they were in Reno, my brother asked him if he made a mistake. "No, I want the 9'ers to win. This way if they loose at least I'll get paid and I'm more then willing to lose that amount to watch them win. So the way I see it either way I win."

They're using Intrade as a form of propaganda, or at least trying to prevent it from becoming propaganda for the other side. That's to be expected, but it's not something which is generally acknowledged. Other people are using it as a bookmaker, which is fine. People will gamble. Still others look it at as a "market" which supposedly gives a window into truth. That's deluded on a couple of levels.

a friend of mine in philly did a study that tracked the introduction of the dow jones industrial average into television news programs as the nightly indicator for astrological projections about the state of all things. it happened in the early 1970s.
before that, various indices to do with gdp were used.
they were less amenable to astrology.

Statistical analysis, possibly/probably biased. Take with as much salt as your worldview demands.

FiveThirtyEight.com: Electoral Projections Done Right