I'd like to see "none of the above" make a come back.
Zogby: McCain now leads 48-47
- Thread starter JayS
- Start date
Intrade is better
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http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_7060/is_/ai_n28529266
Smart money: political futures markets are better predictors than polls
American Conservative, The, June 2, 2008 by Michael Brendan Dougherty
E-mail Print Link IN NOVEMBER 2004, a man with half a million dollars was looking to double his money. He could have gone to a high-stakes table in Vegas. He could have put his money in a hedge fund and waited. Instead, he signed on to a Dublin-based website, Intrade, the night before the presidential election and put everything on George W. Bush, then running even with John Kerry. The next morning, he was a millionaire.
Carl Wolfenden, the acting exchange manager of Intrade, explains the logic of prediction markets: "Our members sign up and trade with the intention of making money. One of the byproducts of that, the pricing information that they generate, translates into probability. The market pricing is measuring the probability of uncertain future events." The results are eerily accurate.
How To Get Things Done: A Guide To Strategic Planning Tens of thousands of people bet money on who would win each state in the 2004 general election, and Intrade's political futures market predicted the winner in all 50. Two years later, the Intrade favorite won every single Senate race. Investors, or, if you prefer, gamblers, were generating political predictions far more accurate than professional pollsters'. They were also winning and losing piles of money.
But the political prediction markets didn't begin with high-rolling political junkies. They started with a few dozen college students. In 1988, the University of Iowa business school opened the Iowa Electronic Markets as an experiment. They allowed anyone to buy contracts based on how they thought a given candidate would do in an upcoming election. The market developed a price per share. If the market moved Candidate A's price up to 50 cents a share, it was saying that Candidate A had a 50 percent chance of winning.
"We collected almost 1,000 polls that came out during the election cycles, and compared the poll prediction to the IEM prediction," says Professor Joyce Berg, "and in 75 percent of cases the IEM was closer to the actual outcome than the polls were." One study showed that IEM's prices on the eve of an election were off by an average of just 1.37 percent.
Berg says that the people trading are nothing like a random sample of voters. "In 1988, everyone was from Iowa, and we only had 155 people in the vote-share market. Even now, when we have thousands of people in each market, we are not distributed among states by population. Our traders are overwhelmingly male. They have more education than the average voter. They have a higher income than the average voter. But the market mechanism is one where we don't need a random sample of voters, we need people with information." In other words, a large representative sample of the electorate cannot accurately predict its own behavior when asked a simple question. But a group of students betting their spring break money can.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_7060/is_/ai_n28529266
Smart money: political futures markets are better predictors than polls
American Conservative, The, June 2, 2008 by Michael Brendan Dougherty
E-mail Print Link IN NOVEMBER 2004, a man with half a million dollars was looking to double his money. He could have gone to a high-stakes table in Vegas. He could have put his money in a hedge fund and waited. Instead, he signed on to a Dublin-based website, Intrade, the night before the presidential election and put everything on George W. Bush, then running even with John Kerry. The next morning, he was a millionaire.
Carl Wolfenden, the acting exchange manager of Intrade, explains the logic of prediction markets: "Our members sign up and trade with the intention of making money. One of the byproducts of that, the pricing information that they generate, translates into probability. The market pricing is measuring the probability of uncertain future events." The results are eerily accurate.
How To Get Things Done: A Guide To Strategic Planning Tens of thousands of people bet money on who would win each state in the 2004 general election, and Intrade's political futures market predicted the winner in all 50. Two years later, the Intrade favorite won every single Senate race. Investors, or, if you prefer, gamblers, were generating political predictions far more accurate than professional pollsters'. They were also winning and losing piles of money.
But the political prediction markets didn't begin with high-rolling political junkies. They started with a few dozen college students. In 1988, the University of Iowa business school opened the Iowa Electronic Markets as an experiment. They allowed anyone to buy contracts based on how they thought a given candidate would do in an upcoming election. The market developed a price per share. If the market moved Candidate A's price up to 50 cents a share, it was saying that Candidate A had a 50 percent chance of winning.
"We collected almost 1,000 polls that came out during the election cycles, and compared the poll prediction to the IEM prediction," says Professor Joyce Berg, "and in 75 percent of cases the IEM was closer to the actual outcome than the polls were." One study showed that IEM's prices on the eve of an election were off by an average of just 1.37 percent.
Berg says that the people trading are nothing like a random sample of voters. "In 1988, everyone was from Iowa, and we only had 155 people in the vote-share market. Even now, when we have thousands of people in each market, we are not distributed among states by population. Our traders are overwhelmingly male. They have more education than the average voter. They have a higher income than the average voter. But the market mechanism is one where we don't need a random sample of voters, we need people with information." In other words, a large representative sample of the electorate cannot accurately predict its own behavior when asked a simple question. But a group of students betting their spring break money can.
Yeah,we really need this guy
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Watch this and imagine Mccain in charge of the US military
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The mitary resume of a great military leader
Graduated at the bottom of his navel academy class (He only got in and stayed in because his dad and granddad were
Admirals)
Crashed 2 planes he was flying
Crashed into power lines
Getting shot down
Signed a confession and made numerous propaganda films for the enemy starting only 4 days after capture
20 hours of combat duty
Fully supported The Iraq war
Totally misjudged how the iraq war would play out
His only successful call was the surge,but you don't need to be an expert to say send more troops
Graduated at the bottom of his navel academy class (He only got in and stayed in because his dad and granddad were
Admirals)
Crashed 2 planes he was flying
Crashed into power lines
Getting shot down
Signed a confession and made numerous propaganda films for the enemy starting only 4 days after capture
20 hours of combat duty
Fully supported The Iraq war
Totally misjudged how the iraq war would play out
His only successful call was the surge,but you don't need to be an expert to say send more troops