[ExI] puzzle for intrade fans

[Gordon]

Hi Spike. Is this a trend you see over many days or weeks? I wouldn't read too much into one day's worth of data.

Gordon





________________________________
 From: spike <spike66 at att.net>
To: 'ExI chat list' <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> 
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2012 10:12 PM
Subject: [ExI] puzzle for intrade fans
 

 
There is something I noticed watching InTrade bets for who will win the POTUS elections in a couple weeks.  I need to do some math to convince myself that this is real, but what I noticed is that when the guy from Chicago has a bull run, it takes about an hour or more, but when he has a bear run, it can drop as far as it rose in a few minutes.  Examples are seen below, with a rise of about a point in about an hour, between 644 and about 740, but the bears do their thing right at 921 for about 5 minutes on wacky high trading volume.
 
 
 
This reminds me of stuff we used to talk about way back in the play-money Ideas Futures days, when we used to discuss ways to get the bulls to stampede, or the bears to run for the doors, and make “money” on it either way.  That was cool because it was the experimentation days in program trading, and the discussion list was a prototype Reddit group.
 
If anyone wishes to comment on the above chart, I am not interested in political commentary, but rather the InTrade angle, and if the notion of Ideas Futures in general shed any light here.  I might be seeing ghosts in the data, or some completely random events triggering the well-known phenomenon of how program trading inherently creates positive feedback loops.  I don’t know why that in itself would cause asymmetrical changes in prices.  
 
The only thing I can think of is that this is somehow related to the fact that there are fewer short sellers than those who go long: in this sort of game, people would prefer to hold YES cards for their own guy than NOs for the other guy.  But even then, that still doesn’t explain it because the other guy’s price chart is a mirror image of this one: his bulls are twitchy and his bears are more leisurely.  So puzzling.
 
spike   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
_______________________________________________
extropy-chat mailing list
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20121024/0e78cea3/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image001.png
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 7945 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20121024/0e78cea3/attachment.obj>