[Political Junkie Too]

There is a wiki article on InTrade. It's a prediction market run out of Dublin, Ireland. Since 2010, banking regulations have made it illegal for Americans to fund their InTrade accounts with credit or debit cards issued from American banks.

-PJ

[DrC]

“Since 2010, banking regulations have made it illegal for Americans to fund their InTrade accounts with credit or debit cards issued from American banks.”

Until this happened, I used to bet more regularly at Intrade. They’re totally legit: all my bets got paid off etc. But what others have said is also true. There don’t appear to be that many people betting, so it’s possible for just a few bettors willing to put up a lot of money to sway the results. There have been academic studies showing that these kinds of betting markets are more accurate than conventional opinion polls in terms of predicting election odds and margins. I’m guessing that someone like Nate Silver has an outsized impact on such markets. He puts Obama’s chances of winning at 80% http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/author/nate-silver/