Has anyone here ever used INTRADE?

Sept. 13, 2012 | Hildy

[Hildy]

I cannot believe the odds they have for Presidential election. I just want to make sure they are totally legit and have history of paying out and it's all legal, right?

[napscoordinator]

I haven't Hildy. They are more accurate because it is real money and I would imagine that they pay out or people would not still be using it (I am assuming). The bad part is that 68 percent think Obama gets a second term. That MUST be before this disastrous week. A few weeks ago it was at around 58 percent. I look at Intrade occasionally.

[SMGFan]

I have heard of intrade from Ann Coulter and posted this topic. But I know little about it.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2928755/posts

[midway1]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QW46V4XNxwY

INTRADE is discussed on the above video.

[ansel12]

I would like to piggy back onto your thread with this related question.

Does anyone remember where intrade had Governor Palin at, as a possible veep choice in August of 2008

[Political Junkie Too]

There is a wiki article on InTrade. It's a prediction market run out of Dublin, Ireland. Since 2010, banking regulations have made it illegal for Americans to fund their InTrade accounts with credit or debit cards issued from American banks.

-PJ

[justlurking]

Intrade is the equivalent of a bar bet, albeit a few thousand of them, combined. It is simply a bunch of people betting on what they think the outcome will be.

Stop stressing about it. It doesn’t mean anything. And even if it did, it would take only a moderate amount of money to manipulate the prices - just like a penny stock.

[arista]

"68 percent think Obama gets a second term"

Right now Obama's chance of winning the election is trading at 65 on Intrade. That doesn't mean that 65% of the traders think he will win. It doesn't mean that they think he will get 65% of the vote.

It means that people who think he will win are putting at risk $6.50 for a chance to win $3.50. On the othr side of the bet are people who think he will lose who are risking $3.50 for a chance to win $6.50.

The best way to think of Intrade is as a conglomeration of public knowledge of an event.

[DrC]

“Since 2010, banking regulations have made it illegal for Americans to fund their InTrade accounts with credit or debit cards issued from American banks.”

Until this happened, I used to bet more regularly at Intrade. They’re totally legit: all my bets got paid off etc. But what others have said is also true. There don’t appear to be that many people betting, so it’s possible for just a few bettors willing to put up a lot of money to sway the results. There have been academic studies showing that these kinds of betting markets are more accurate than conventional opinion polls in terms of predicting election odds and margins. I’m guessing that someone like Nate Silver has an outsized impact on such markets. He puts Obama’s chances of winning at 80% http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/author/nate-silver/

[jespasinthru]

Gambling on the presidential election must be fun if you have the time and the bucks. Isn’t INTRADE the one with the talking baby commercials?

[midway1]

You’re thinking of E-Trade.

[kaehurowing]

As I understand it, the concept was developed by DARPA (the Black Box guys at DoD) as an intelligence gathering method to predict the likelihood of future events happening. The philosophy was that human beings as a group have a higher consciousness and knowledge of what is likely to happen in the future than individuals do. So they attempted to channelize that into a website where people would lay money on the likelihood of things happening or not happening. At some point the public became aware of the program and got incensed, and the program was then ended.

But the concept continued on in the commercial venture of Intrade, which essentially does the same thing (”predictive markets”).

[norwaypinesavage]

"It means that people who think he will win are putting at risk $6.50 for a chance to win $3.50. On the othr side of the bet are people who think he will lose who are risking $3.50 for a chance to win $6.50."

There's gotta be some margin for the bookie. Any idea what that is?

[arista]

There's gotta be some margin for the bookie. Any idea what that is?

They charge their account holders a flat $4.99 per month.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

No personal experience, but I noticed the same phenomenon four years ago of an improbable-seeming event - liberals were claiming that Sarah Palin would be dropped from the ticket - being predicted on Intrade. Like you, I saw that “prediction” and thought there could be money to be made betting against that improbable-seeming event. I was dissuaded because

1. Like you, I had no experience of Intrade, and

2. When you think about it, buying insurance is simply betting that something bad will happen. Therefore betting that Obama will win a second term is the opposite of buying insurance against that disaster.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

No personal experience, but I noticed the same phenomenon four years ago of an improbable-seeming event - liberals were claiming that Sarah Palin would be dropped from the ticket - being predicted on Intrade. Like you, I saw that “prediction” and thought there could be money to be made betting against that improbable-seeming event. I was dissuaded because

1. Like you, I had no experience of Intrade, and

2. When you think about it, buying insurance is simply betting that something bad will happen. Therefore betting that Obama will not win a second term is the opposite of buying insurance against that disaster.