Bayesian Investor Blog

To deter any suspicion that the comparisons I plan to make between Intrade’s predictions and polls are comparisons I selected to make Intrade look good, I’m announcing now that I intend to use FiveThirtyEight.com as the primary poll aggregator. I intend to pay attention to predictions that are more long-term than I focused in 2004, so the comparison I’ll attach the most importance to will be based on the first snapshot I took of FiveThirtyEight.com’s state by state projections, which was on July 24.

Also, as of last week, one of the Presidential Decision Markets that I’m subsidizing, DEM.PRES-OIL.FUTURES, has attracted enough trading (I suspect from one large trader) to make me reasonably confident that it’s showing the effects of trader opinion rather than the effects of my automated market maker (saying that oil futures will drop if the Democratic candidate wins, and rise if he loses).