I use the Intrade prediction market contracts in class to illustrate how markets aggregate and process information. At present, the Obama 2008 Presidential Contract is trading between $0.66 and $0.67 (in other words, it pays $1 if Obama wins, and costs about $0.66 to play).
Jeff Matthews has an interesting piece on how a recent Obama campaign email makes him wonder if the Obama contract might be a good candidate to short (they indicate that there was a shortfall in fund raising relative to the last month's figure). It;'ll be interesting to see how this plays out.
Read the piece - Jeff notes some interesting parallels to earnings management, discounting, and channel stuffing.
Ah well - back to SAS coding.
