The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) recently held a public meeting to discuss proposed rules regarding event contracts. Under current regulations, there are only a few enumerated restrictions on contracts, including war, terrorism, and assassination. Those three restrictions were mentioned repeatedly during the two-hour meeting, reminding one of the apocryphal story about former Secretary of […]
Kissinger’s Betting Odds Read More »
Jonathan Zubkoff – aka ZubbyBadger – is a top prediction market trader. A professional trader in events markets, he’s made over six figures on PredictIt, serves as Community Manager for Kalshi, and earlier this year won the CSPI/Salem Forecasting Tournament with $25,000 in prize money. The second-place finisher of that tournament, Robert Grosse, wrote a
The 514 trades that won ZubbyBadger $25K Read More »
The New York Times recently wrote about how “The Fed’s Decisions Now Could Alter the 2024 Elections” (11/17/2023) and cited Yale Professor Ray Fair’s economy-driven election forecasting model: Professor Fair’s pioneering U.S. elections model does something that was fairly radical when he created it in the 1970s. It analyzes politics without really considering politics. Instead,
Ray Fair vs. Iowa Electronic Markets Read More »
As the 1944 presidential election approached, predictions differed between the political pundits who prognosticated and the bookmakers who took bets on the presidential election. The former, who were seen as experts in politics, were forecasting a neck-and-neck race between incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, while the bookies
The Experts Versus Gamblers in 1944 Read More »
Nearly every lecture, article, book, discussion, and PowerPoint presentation about the “Wisdom of Crowds” contains the story of Sir Francis Galton and the weight-judging contest at a country fair, if not mentioning it at the very beginning. There are two problems with the account of ‘Galton at the country fair.’ First, the story rings false
What exactly happened when Francis Galton went to the livestock show? Read More »
