Well, what a sucker I am!
The highly-predictive Intrade futures contract is valued at .1 (divide by ten and that’s a penny, folks), but Hunter Duncan actually DID poll at 4% in the notoriously inaccurate ARG, near as I can tell.
That’s the danger here. Fred is quoted at 6% (actually not a polling number, just a futures contract price, and definitely NOT a percentage) and Hunter is quoted at 4% (an actual, albeit shabby, poll) and an apples-to-oranges comparison misleads the reader.
That’s how good—and how dangerous—this lie is, it’s designed to deceive (to play a shell game between the two very different kind of data), and it works.
Let’s review:
Intrade futures contracts:
Fred about $6
Hunter $.1
Rasmussen daily polling:
Fred 12%
Hunter - too low to ascertain, 2% shared with others.
That’s how good—and how dangerous—this lie is,
***Yup. What you just posted was either a lie or a mistake. You cc’d Kevkrom, not me. I’ve seen others do that in the hopes that the post would be overlooked.
I will let the readers decide for themselves.
It took you this long to actually start using the data. You said, “highly-predictive Intrade futures contract is valued at .1 “ which means that you consider it highly-predictive and good data. Now, I happen to not like the fact that Hunter is valued so low, but I’m posting Intrade results right & left because they are what they are. But you go around calling me a liar after you’ve posted on the thread where Fred was leading at Intrade and accepting the good news as good data.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1842292/posts
You and I went round & round on that other thread where it was agreed this was an apples-to-oranges comparison (metaphor put forth by me, not you) and I said it was reasonable as long as I called it fruit. Apples are apples, oranges are oranges, both are fruit. Polling data are polls, Intrade is futures contracts, and both are data.
I think our exchanges should prove educational on the efficacy thread so I think I will copy them over to there.
Thanks for bumping the thread.
Suppose that a person somehow knew with certainty that the Democrat candidate for President would get exactly 49.9% of the popular vote, and the Republican would get exactly 50.1%. How much should that person be willing to pay for shares that will pay off $1 if the Republican gets a larger fraction of the popular-vote than the Democrats (regardless of who wins the electoral votes) and $0 if the Democrat gets the larger fraction?