Slashdot Mirror
Public Markets For Predicting Google's Market Cap
k2enemy writes "The Iowa Electronic Markets have created two markets where traders may buy and sell contracts based on beliefs of Google's market cap at the end of the first day of public trading. The first market, GOOGLE_LIN, trades contracts with liquidation values linearly dependent on the market cap. The second, GOOGLE_WTA, trades six unique and exhaustive contracts in a winner-takes-all market. The markets are currently suggesting a market cap around $30-35 billion. The IEM is also popular for its political markets, which have been very successful (more accurate than polls) at predicting political elections."
Anyone else notice the amount of FUD concerning the IPO? Google is the first to step in and help the little investor and, all of a sudden, the rich people are funding FUD campaigns so they can get in on the deal.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Its not working though.
Google hasnt really budged on its position, and they still are not worried about the fatcats' FUD. Im not google, nor am I employed there, but I think they want their popularity, usability, and value speak for themselves.
that these people are pretty much "gambling" on the stock market, something that is pretty much gambling in and of itself.
It's like gambling on someone else playing the slot machine. o.O O.o What's the point?
It's an interesting idea of how to make predictions, because after all, like in real life, a lot of people will vote for someone/not at all because they think everyone else has.
/., with an uncapped mod limit, but there is a big change around the 2-3 area, but when you get to -1/5, each moderation becomes less of a change. Not really practical though. Wouldn't want to hurt /. servers.
Kind of like one of those equations in Neural nets. I can't remember it exactly, I think it was something like 1/(e^(-t)*log(t)) that causes more change when the votes are close, and less when it's near the extremes, since with a very high/low buying price, you change people's confidence in that decision.
I always thought it would be interesting to try it on
Disclaimers: My PhD advisor was a member of JASON and one of my girlfriends in college was there at the very beginning of the Iowa Electronic Market.
In early June, Bush enjoyed a commanding lead over Kerry. Since then, Bush's shares have dipped 7 percent, from 55 cents to 51 cents on Tuesday afternoon. Over the same period, Kerry's shares have appreciated 7 percent, from 45.5 cents to 49 cents.
So who has the controlling shares for each candidate?
Hello people... this is not 1999. We're talking about a company whose only product is online advertising - subtle online advertising at that. You're talking about an Internet search engine having a larger market cap than a lot of Dow30 components who actually have shipping product. What makes google so valuable? What is google going to do for money (besides take it from investors) the next time the Internet advertising market evaporates? What dependencies has google created that will keep revenue flowing? How has google diversified to guard against volatility in the Internet markets?
It's time to start thinknig RATIONALLY about google. Everyone has become so enamored with google that they are overlooking the somewhat minor point that they have zero fundamentals.
Where on earth are getting "help the little investor"? Google isn't helping the little investor anymore than anyone else is. What you pay for those 5 minimum shares is the market price. That is the same damn price you will pay on etrade the next day. (where you can buy 1 share if you like). And the fact that lots of people share your belief only suggests to me that the price will be inflated because they think they will be "getting a deal." If they wanted to help the little guy (and not themselves) they would offer the shares at the price wall street would've normally paid for them to the investor with a maximum number of shares that can be purchased (like 50). But that is not what they are doing, they are helping themselves, but pocketing the profits wall street usually gets on the road from the IPO price to the market price (which is often, but not always, higher).
Laboratree - Scientific collaboration based on OpenSocial.
Not that they should. Nothing is known about the direction the stock will take post-IPO. It could easily drop 25-50% in the first few days. The market for technical issues is negative right now.
There are different approaches to timing entry into a stock. Technical analysis assumes that all information about a stock is factored into the price. Indicators based on prior price history are used to determine trend. Proponents of the method say the price movement is a manifestation of crowd behavior.
Fundamental analysts study the companies financials, such as trends in earnings, price to sales ratio, profit margin, return on equity, etc.
Another approach is to find companies that are likely to profit from long term major trends in technology and/or society.
As for the Google IPO, there is no stock history on which to base a technical analysis. One might argue whether the fundamentals make the investment worthwhile, and the third approach takes a very long term view, so there is no good reason to jump on board immediately.
Lastly, if you are considering buying this IPO in speculation of it going up significantly in the next few days, have the mental fortitude to set a stop loss below your entry point and get the hell out if it drops to that point, or you stand to lose a lot of money, fast. This is no market for amateurs.
Ask me about my vow of silence!
Someone buying 5 shares is not a speculator. That person would be an investor. Investors are intrested in the long term. Hoping that by lending a company a sum of money now that company can use that money to increase its business thereby increase profits and in the future repay the loan with a nice little interest (dividends). True investment is more like a loan that doesn't have to be paid back unless you make a profit.
Speculation is just hoping that someone else will want to buy your shares for more then you have bought them. It has no intrest in the future of the company.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I really thought DARPA's PAM project was a novel and perhaps useful tool. However, I think the acceptance of this idea, yet the rejection of PAM comes down to a few key points:
Ultimately, I would have liked to see the DARPA project take off, and maybe one day down the road, we will see it rehashed. I feel it certainly provides a better warning system than an arbitrary color coding system that never seems to dip far below "Panic Struck Plaid" these days.
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this margin is too small to contain.
MIT Technology Review's futures trading marketplace, Innovation Futures, has a comparable Google IPO Watch, predicting when Google will go public, what its market cap will be, and how that will compare to Yahoo!'s market cap. Traders on Innovation Futures are also predicting a cap of $30-35B, but it is by no means a majority. A significant number are still holding on to $25-30B. The site also has a number of other markets dealing with VC and IPOs, Economy and Growth, and trends in technology
Shipping, storage, handling, packaging all costs heaps and heaps of money and there really are no more ways to save. But what if you don't need any of that? Google doesn't have to deal with dockworkers strikes, faulty ingredients, recalls, fluctuating material prices, outlawing of certain materials. Nothing. Just make a product and sell sell sell.
Airline companies are going bankrupt while doing real things as you would put it. A single accident killed the concorde, rising oilprices are making airline companies grown and victims of "accidents" are starting to demand massive damages as they learn the accidents happen because of cut downs in maintenance.
So where do you put your money? In clean simple google? Or one of the messy real industries?
The only problem with buying google shares is that is to late. Best time to invest is at the start. Not when the company is already long established.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Simple math, it doesn't take a professional. You seemed to have forgottej to mention that your "winner" person Y had to have someone brand new enter new REAL cash into the market in order for Y to "cash out". That real cash did not come from the market as it stood a second before the cashout, it had to come from outside the market and be introduced into it for the cashout to take place (very broadly speaking but it's true). You forgot that in your details. It's pyramidal, real cash has to be constantly pumped in to it above and beyond the tangible accumulated wealth produced by the goods represented by the actual corporations Service money is a dilution of wealth in the aggregate, hence the name "service". Wealth is a function of ownership of the land, what can be grown or extracted in some manner or form from the land, or what can be manufactured from any combination of the last two. Everything else is a dilution and constitutes wealth production re-arrangement, not wealth production.. If the market wasn't pyramidal, theoretically you could freeze the market one day, at whatever bid price was current,and everyone could do this "cashout" thing, and that's not possible, is it? In fact it might be *at best* a few pennies on the buck in reality, isn't it, right now?
If what you said was true, the crash of 29-34 would have resulted in "all winners", there wouldn't have been a crash at all, we would have had a perpetual boom cycle. We didn't,did we?
Here's the proof. When I was a kid, you could literally go into the five and dime (a lot of people have never even seen such a store, I think they are rare now) and buy a nice bundle of real old great depression era stocks as a novelty for one dime, less than a penny apiece. Very pretty, all curleycue scrolled edges, very impressive looking. They probably represented quite a lot of lost money for a lot of investors. They actually did gamble and lose, millions of them, there were only a few big winners.
No, I won't repeat what you said,because it's not true, I'll say it's an elaborate ponzi scheme that only exists by inducing new suckers into it every friday afternoon. It's not much different from a huge MLM where you have to get people "under you" to actually support you so you don't have to actually produce any true wealth, with the difference being there are much less real products involved than most MLMs which are scussy enough as they are. Theoretical paper contracts as in the article are not much in the way of a real tangible product, they do nothing to help the over all economy, all they do is re-arrange what wealth exists, they produce *nothing*, and the only what it is possible is by shilling newsuckers into it all the time.
Originally how it was set up it was much closer to being a real "investment", with more at least semi honest quantifiable risk data to use for your assessment if you should invest or not. It is not that way now, or are you forgetting the recent dot bomb phenomenon?
Ladbroke's sportsbook. (I always hit this one and ignore the Gallup/Roper bullcrap!)
JMR
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
Just last night I was browsing the Foresight Exchange, one of the oldest trading floors for betting fake money on real world events. They've nothing related to Google right now, but you can speculate on claims from the year of the first human Mars landing to the likelihood of fangs and tails becoming fashionable body modifications by 2010.