alt="Price for 2008 Presidential Election Winner (Individual) at intrade.com"title="Price for 2008 Presidential Election Winner (Individual) at intrade.com" border="0">
When I'm writing this, that Obama contract is at 52.9. MCain, on the other hand, is not 47 - he's 46. Hilary Clinton, bizarrely enough, is at 3.5%. That's money on the table as far as I can tell. Unless someone is saying there's a 3.5% chance that Obama is getting assassinated, then Hilary Clinton has a zero 0% chance of being President.
The Democratic contract, though, is interestingly enough holding at 55%, and the Republican contract is at 46%. So as far as I can see, the party contracts are equal to the individual contracts, with Hilary Clinton adding in as a spoiler? Who is taking the other side of that stupid bet? I wonder if someone is screwing with these markets. If they stay here for a week, I'll believe them. Right now I'm skeptical.
Update: I'm not the only one skeptical and thinking these are weird. The billionare stock manipulator, who I'm going to call Jed Clampett hypothesis, is mentioned over at MR by Zephyrus. I remember people thinking Soros was doing that in 2004 with the Kerry/Bush contracts - massive, huge movements due to high volume trading that showed Bush's contract shaky, creating some noise. I think we just wait and see. If it's real, it'll stick. If it's fake, it'll get arbitraged away.
3 comments:
yeah, i'm really confused by both intrade and the polls (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/president/us/general_election_mccain_vs_obama-225.html) - does "enthusiasm" translate into that much of a bump? i hadn't heard the speculation about soros before, was anything ever verified that somethings was being manipualted?
think the link got chopped, here it is
No, no one ever did. Donald Luskin said it was Soros, saying it was consistent with his speculative attack on the Bank of England which destroyed the pound. Basically what happened was Bush's contract plummeted suddenly from 58 to 10. InTrade said it was someone selling record volumes of the Bush contract, and enough to push the price down (although, only temporarily - it quickly rebounded as traders started buying at those deflated prices and pushed the price back up to 58).
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