On Wed, Aug 7, 2013 at 3:02 AM, blaze spinnaker <[email protected]>wrote:
I am thinking of a new formation of a bet. > Just to go off on a tangent here (I'm good for that), I'm open-minded about the possibilities of prediction markets. It seems like people have the ability to use bayesian reasoning (a.k.a. intuition), and that risking losing something important to them can help sharpen their concentration. Perhaps it would be reputation rather than money, but money might also do the trick in a setting where only limited sums can be wagered (to prevent distortions in the prediction market). And perhaps bayesian reasoning of a number of people, suitably aggregated, is even more powerful. So I'm generally open to the idea that there might be something to this whole approach. I would be very interested to know of any studies as to its efficacy. But one question I have has to do with nickel futures. I assume that if a prediction market is better than the flipping of a coin as to the probability of an outcome, the actual stock market will show a phenomenon. In that case I would expect nickel futures have trended up during the last few years. Instead I see them trending down since 2008. (Please note -- I am not giving any kind of investment advice here.) If I believed LENR was probably real (which I do), and I believed prediction markets are better than flipping a coin (I don't have a strong opinion on this one), I would expect nickel futures to trend up over the last few years, especially since Rossi came onto the scene in 2011 or so, but this is when they have really started going down, after a momentary rise. What part of the analysis am I getting wrong? Eric
