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“Anyone playing around with PredictIt for the election? “

me. i cleared $6,000 after fees and taxes in 2016 PredictIt markets betting on Trump in 2016 ... odds were in the range 2-1 to 3-1 against Trump then, which was amazingly stupid odds and made it easy to win big without risk of big loss ...

odds are not as good this year though, only 3-2 against Trump right now ... still, for 2020, i’ve got several market bets on Trump to win in all of it’s many different all-for-practical-purposes idential markets, as well as several individual states ... couldn’t bet as much as i wanted, so i set up Mrs. Catnipman an account and staked her market bets too ...

one strange thing about the odds though right now, is that they haven’t reacted a single iota to the steady drumbeat of polls in the various swing states that are shifting in trump’s favor, as well as early indications of bad news for Dem turnout and good news for GOP turnout in various locales, plus the whole hunter laptop scandal, and i’ve been trying to figure out why ... the odds in 2016 were equally out of whack ...

so, why are the betting odds seemingly so out of whack?

predictit.org is a legal marketplace “betting” site that’s an academic experiment at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, and what i’ve decided is that it attracts a substantial number of marketplace bettors from NZ, Australia and Europe, ALL of which have even more slanted “news” than the U.S., and the fools that are betting there are betting based on VERY limited and HIGHLY biased information compared to what FReepers have available to us ... thus i consider those of us in the U.S. who ignore the fake polls and intensely study a large variety of sources outside the mainstream have a leg up on the average ignorant bettor at predictit.org ...

at any rate, here’s some explanations i’ve posted to FReepers in the past about how to “bet” the predicit marketplaces:

fundamentally, the whole thing is much like buying and selling shares of stock that always have a face value of $1.00. you always get $1.00 back per share IF you win (if you lose, you get nothing back), so if you buy shares at 65¢ and you win, your profit will be 35¢/share (less fees and eventually taxes, as they’ll send you a 1099 form for gambling winnings or losses)

Basically, what you’re doing is that you’re always buying $1.00 shares at a discount. Most markets are usually buy/sell YES and NO shares, so you’re buying or selling either YES shares or NO shares, but in all cases shares are worth a dollar IF YOU win no matter what you pay.

IF you win, you’ll always get back $1.00 for each share you bought no matter what, and your personal profit will be the difference between the $1.00 you get back minus what you paid for the share, so the main thing to keep in mind is that you always get back a dollar IF you win, no matter how much you paid for the share.

Which also basically means it’s hardly worthwhile to bet on sure winners if, for example, you have to pay .99 cents a share ... in fact, you would ultimately lose money because predictit.org takes 10% of your profit and 5% of any amount you ultimately have them send you back, though they take NO fees up front.

To actually buy shares (bet):

1. You’ll need to establish an account with predictit.com

2. After you establish your account (loginID, password, name, address, etc.), you then to FUND your account with the amount you want to buy shares with by depositing money in your account paid for with your credit card. (Basically, you don’t want to deposit more money than you’re planning on betting at the time because they take 5% when you withdraw money from the account, so if you want to buy additional shares, then simply deposit more funds.)

3. In our case, you’ll (presumably) want to buy YES shares for Trump to win. (there’s also several essentially identical markets, such as which party will win the Presidency, will there be a female VP, etc.)

4. Divide the best offer that others are willing to sell you YES shares for by the amount you deposited, and then fill in the nearest whole number of shares you can pay for from your deposited funds after you click “BUY YES”

5. Once you’ve bought shares, you can actually sell them at any time, taking a loss or a profit, depending on how the market moved after your purchase. I plan to hold my shares until the end for maximum profit (or loss).

6. Also, note that there are multiple nearly identical markets in some cases , such as which party will win the Presidency, will the VP be female, etc., which is useful for anyone wanting to bet more than the maximum allowed per person per market ($850.00/market).

7. Bottom line, it IS confusing! And not being a gambler and having zero past experience in betting before 2016, I studied the whole setup very carefully for at least three days before attempting to bet. It’s also a good idea to study this FAQ:

https://www.predictit.org/support/faq