Posts by BenWilson
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Stephen Judd,
It's nowhere near direct enough. But I presume you are joking. I wouldn't insure my house against a positive correlation between them paying, and my place burning down (accidentally). It would need to be a firmer deal to justify the premiums.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Michael Homer,
I think the real secret is that there hasn't been any insider trading on most of them at all, and I wouldn't take them as having much predictive value because of that on top of all the other reasons.
Except that they have been extremely accurate? I don't see how it's possible to be sure there has or hasn't been insider trading, that's an incredibly difficult thing to prosecute. But if there was a lot, it wouldn't make them any less predictive, it would just mean that the traders were being unethical.
Volumes are low, but they're bets mostly by the most informed audience. Who else really bothers with such betting except policy wonks and statistics obsessors? Over time, everyone loses as the house takes their piece, so these things are mostly matters of pride. It's not like this market exists for the same reasons as derivative markets - futures and options were meant to exist so that companies could take out insurance against commodity price fluctuations, and investors could take out insurance against stock price collapses. That they get used the other way around, to magnify risk hugely, is a perverse outcome for those instruments (and society). So it's not clear that volumes are what it's all about.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Lew Stoddart,
Technically I think it was established as a futures market. I'm not au fait with the difference between such things.
Yes, I thought it was likely to be futures, but went for the more generic "derivatives" (of which futures is a subset), just to be safe.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
Having said that , Red Alert has invited scrutiny of which all candidates are reading and no doubt some caucus too
In terms of response times to questions they invited on their own blog, Nanaia came in fastest, responding to my question within 20 minutes. Cunliffe came second, at around 7 hours, but did have the excuse that he was speaking in Palmerston North, and then drove back to Wellington, and he answered after midnight. Robertson and Shearer came in at 21 hours.
In order of the effort and conviction they put into their responses, it was (IMHO) Nanaia, Robertson, Cunliffe, Shearer. I did ask Cunliffe the hardest question, though.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Lew Stoddart,
It's more like a derivatives market, surely? Zero sum minus the house cut. Which makes it far more akin to gambling than investing, as far as I can see. It's the main reason I wouldn't put my money in there.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Lew Stoddart,
Make of the whole mess what you will. At this point it's a great big political rorschach test.
Yup, I guess anyone who loves their gambling is really hoping for short term movements as the minor pieces of news leak out, like which of the Labour people wears a toupee or how much traction the "Silent T" joke is getting.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Lew Stoddart,
In the case of ipredict, it's the latter. I think what we're seeing is some jockeying now because the result of the leadership contest tomorrow will impact the price of other stocks that don't close for a long time yet.
Yes, I feel it's likely too. The further out the prediction, the more likely it is to be affected by the general sentiment of the trader, rather than the trader's reading of all the information available. But it does worry me that the general sentiment amongst the traders is that with Shearer likely, National is likely. I wonder what they know.
I'm not about to go full blown conspiracy. Shearer can have BBQs with whomever he likes. It's purely a personal matter that seeing Cactus Kate and WhaleOil on the guest list would put me off attending.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Andrew E,
A more important question, to my mind, is how the Labour Party thinks it can address the problem of popular disengagement with politics, when it doesn't even give party members outside of the parliamentary caucus a vote in choosing the leader?
Word up, son.
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Another thing that gives me pause. iPredict, which has been extremely accurate so far, has been holding Shearer as the most likely candidate for a while. However, recently, it's stopped predicting a Labour win in 2014. What do all those insider traders know?
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Russell Brown,
By the same token, I think that Cunliffe's palpable alienation of so many colleagues doesn't speak well for his ability to lead a united Parliamentary party.
It's hard to be sure which comes first. Maybe they're not a particularly united bunch anyway. I think that's highly likely, considering how there is not one dissenter in there from the idea of "let's have a royal rumble". There may be a strong but silent faction jockeying for a major bloodletting. Which might be a healthy thing, considering the ridiculous choices Labour made for their list prioritization.
May, might, could. My current feeling is of disconnect - it is not a process in which anyone but the caucus are involved, so it's all a bit soap opera. Who knows what fait accompli might have been pulled, what dirty photos are being handed around, what midnight meetings are being held by co-conspirators? Will Chris Warner suddenly appear, and declare his undying love one way or the other?
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