Technology Review Launches Futures Market

prostoalex writes "MIT Technology Review launched a futures market, allowing people to bet on ideas. A similar concept was at some point introduced by the Pentagon, but later the project was shut down. Currently you can bet on major stock indices, on answers to yes/no questions ('Will Oracle acquire PeopleSoft Inc before March 31st, 2004?') and technological achievements ('When will there be a commercially available electronic device using ultrawideband technology?')" Although the game doesn't use real money, the prizes are pretty swell. I like to think of it as the nerd's version of sportsbook.

Comments

Whats to stop this

[mesach]

What's to stop this from becoming real? Why can't I bet on things like this in Vegas or Atlantic City?

Re:Whats to stop this

[Sivaram_Velauthapill]

Do you really want to live in a world where major world events are influenced by people trying to make a quick easy buck off gambling?

hmm... isn't that what capitalism is all about? I mean, isn't a sizeable chunk of the stock market pure gambling?

Sivaram Velauthapillai

How to win

[ortholattice]

1. Set up 2^n accounts.

2. Bet half one way, half the other. Discard the half that loses.

3. n--

4. If n>0, goto step 2.

5. Profit!!!

Re:How to win

[jbuhler]

I think the poster was misremembering a classic stock scam. What he *really* meant was this:

(1) Identify 2^n gullible people as "marks."

(2) Send each mark an email predicting the outcomes of the next n successive events (I'm assuming the outcomes are all yes/no). Each mark gets one of the 2^n possible sets of predictions.

(3) Wait for the n events to unfold.

(4) Identify the one mark who got an email with all correct predictions, and persuade him to subscribe to your "amazingly accurate" prediction service for a hefty fee.

(5) Abscond.

In the original version of the scam, the events were that a particular stock would go up or down on each of a succession of days.

Re:Right out of Brunner's Shockwave Rider

[richie2000]

polling enough people with enough knowledge of the subject to have an opinion

I'd like to paraphrase that into "Nobody knows what's going on around here, but everybody has an opinion".

Just look at the audience votes in Who wants to be a millionaire. I saw some screenshots from the German version where this lady was asked what George W. Bush's first name was (THE FULL NAME WAS *IN* *THE* *QUESTION*!) and first she used the 50-50 lifeline to eliminate all options except George and Edward. Then she asked the audience and not only did the majority of the idiots vote Edward, 3% of them actually voted for an already eliminated option (Gertrude or something, I don't remember). She gave Edward as her final answer.

Re:Foresight Exchange has been doing this for year

[Hank Reardon]

Can a drug dealer in Colombia transfer money to some corrupt DEA agent in New York by using stock markets?

Possible, but unlikely. Money laundering schemes normally work by routing "dirty" money through a "clean" operation with a small cut being taken by whoever's doing the washing. You'd want to make sure that you're money isn't at any more risk than normal, and the stock market would inject too much risk into the transaction. Not to mention that huge bidirectional trades of stock in a short time can cause the SEC to blink.

Far better to have a legitimate shell corporation hire the DEA agent for "security consultations" for some exorbanant hourly fee and move the money that way.

At least, that's how the whole laundering thing was explained to me. I'm not an accountant, I just write their software...