Tuesday, December 16, 2008  Prediction Markets Review     Many
argue the markets just followed the predictions based on polls
like Nate Silver's fivethirtyeight.com. True to a point, Silver
did amazingly well and the markets smartly trusted him. But the
markets also did very well in 2004 without Silver. One can
aggregate polls and other information using hours upon hours of
analysis or one can just trust the markets to get essentially
equally good results with little effort.        1. "...or one
can just trust the markets to get essentially equally good
results with little effort."      Your point about the
predictive power of these boutique markets is somewhat dulled by
the fact that the big markets haven't been doing very well at
predicting much of anything recently.    2. to provide an
exciting collection of political and other prediction markets.
These markets are as much a "prediction" tool as a wind vane or
outdoor thermometer are. They moved up and down according to the
daily trends, with very lit