The Right Coast

October 17, 2004
 
What the blogosphere needs now . . .
By Tom Smith

. . . is a market capitalization weighted index of all the political betting markets on the 2004 election. Realclearpolitics has this very useful site. But look: on tradesports Bush is at 53 or so, while on the IEM he is more like 58. What gives? I suspect tradesports is being manipulated, but who knows? Then there are all the other sites with their lines. Can you do the probabilities in your head from the x/y odds? I can't. Some industrious techonologically gifted person needs to set something up that would give us a moving average (or something) of all these lines together, in percentage form. That would give you a market indicator that would be much more difficult to manipulate, easier to understand, and a better indicator of what was going to happen.