[ExI] intrade betting on the constitutionality of aca

[spike]

Here in the states our congress passed a law a couple years ago which
requires proles to buy health insurance, and a corresponding requirement for
insurance companies to sell it to any prole.  Arguments about the
constitutionality of that law have been swirling ever since, with lower
courts handing down a split decision, so Thursday the Supreme Court will
announce if the law is legal or not.

 

This post isn't about the Affordable Care Act, but rather the betting that
is ongoing regarding the legality of the law on InTrade, which is one of the
real-money offspring of Robin Hansen's Ideas Futures, which many of us
played in the old days.

 

Here's how the betting is going so far:

 

https://data.intrade.com/graphing/jsp/timeAndSalesForm.jsp?contractId=745353
<https://data.intrade.com/graphing/jsp/timeAndSalesForm.jsp?contractId=74535
3&tradeURL=https://www.intrade.com> &tradeURL=https://www.intrade.com

 

What I find interesting is that there are nine justices and I don't know how
many clerks who know and have known since April how this decision went.  So
these could theoretically bet and be assured of a win, pocketing arbitrarily
much cash.  In the stock and derivative world, this would be insider
trading, but those laws are not necessarily applicable to InTrade.  

 

Hansen's Ideas Futures was intentionally set up to not only allow insider
trading, but in a sense to encourage it: the notion was to offer a meme, buy
shares in it and then try to make it so.  I made piles of play money by
predicting when the next record prime number would be discovered for
instance, because I did have some special insight on that question: I
created a mathematical model of the growth of GIMPS and superimposed the
cumulative probability per candidate and the number of candidates cleared
per day.  It worked thrice in a row.  So now I am rich in imaginary money.
I could fund a lavish imaginary retired life with all that imaginary money.

 

But InTrade uses actual currency, and we have in the above link an example
of where insider trading could be done apparently legally.

 

spike

 

 

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