Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

To: All; John Valentine

I’ve been going back & forth with John Valentine over this market thingie and he called me a liar. I will be copying some of the posts over to this thread and post responses here because this is the right place to have the discussion.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1926425/posts?page=151

To: John Valentine
Kevmo: All you are saying is that his contracts are valued low
JV: Au Contraire, mon amie. I am saying that his (Hunter’s) contracts are valued (i.e. priced) too HIGH.
***You say oranges are bright orange, I say apples are not colored orange. It is 2 different things. You ARE saying that Hunter’s contract is valued (priced) low. Then you say it’s priced too high, which is simply another way of saying that it’s valued (priced) low.

You are really in need of some basic education in economics, markets and so on.
***If you honestly think that is true then you will not mind that I copy this response over on my original thread and continue the dialog there. Readers who are interested can go over there if they’re curious about how this turns out, and we will no longer be distracting freepers from the original intent of the thread, which was that “Thompson Argues Polls Will Change”.

Maybe you’re good at figuring poker odds, and that may be a skill you can use. But, you have got a view of market operation that is so ass backwards that it is amusing in one sense and tragic in another.
***Which is why this needs to be stated on the Intrade thread. If what you say is true, they’ll be all over me for it. Hint: They’re not. And since you have so much trouble with my theory we should be having this discussion on that thread.

My theory was that a person could put $100 down on Hunter today and if his Intrade #’s started tracking the polling data (Ron Paul and Huckabee the 2 most recent examples), the guy would get 40X return on investment..

Well, that isn’t really a theory, it’s more of an observation that if somebody owns an asset at a $1 buy in price and the asset goes to $40, the holder has made a 40X return on investment. Sort of trivial, in fact.
***It’s not a theory, it’s a trivial observation? Then how can you argue against it. Your obvious problem is with the hypothetical: “if his Intrade #’s started tracking the polling data (Ron Paul and Huckabee the 2 most recent examples)”

The issue in fact isn’t that at all, it is whether the price of a proposition on Intrade such as “Duncan Hunter to be the Republican Nominee for President” would or should be linked to the standing in the popularity polls. Clearly there is no direct link.
***Obviously, or I wouldn’t even be able to put forth this strategy in the first place. Duh. But there is a correlation, which is something that the Intraders acknowledge. It is difficult to quantify that correlation, but there does appear to be one, and my two recent cited examples are cases for it. I’m sure there are others.

It is very easy to imagine a time when the field has winnowed and there are only two candidates left, one with say 70% popularity and the other with 30%. I would expect the prices on Intrade to be more like $95 for the 70% guy and $5 for the 30% guy. Why? Because these contracts do not measure percent popularity.
***I agree with this. What’s your problem? This happens inexorably as the election day draws closer. You can see it in the Intrade graphs. And one shining example of how this is correct is that Intrade showed Thompson declining rapidly, trading at ~8% when his polls showed him in the 20% range or so. I’m not sure of the exact figures, but it was telling that the Intrade numbers were leading indicators and the poll numbers were the laggers.

Is there a chance that Duncan Hunter contracts could come off the 10 cent price? Sure. I wouldn’t hold my breath.
But again that’s not what you have been arguing.
***That is precisely what I’ve been arguing. The fact that you tell me that it is not what I’ve been arguing shows that YOU did not understand, and that you have been engaging in straw argumentation. In another post I put the chances of Hunter’s contracts going to 4% at about 2 to 1, and it is an opportunity to go for a 40 to 1 contract. Maybe the chances are 3 to 1, maybe they’re 100 to 1, I don’t see that quantified anywhere. But he made it to 4%, getting to 5% is an incremental effort, not a quantum one.

In fact Duncan Hunter contracts are too expensive, and that’s why there are no buyers. If they were cheaper, maybe buyers would come to the party, but we can’t find out because the next tick down is zero. There’s your liquidity issue explained for you again.
***The Duncan Hunter contracts are valued at 0.1. That’s their price. You cannot argue that it is not their price. Someone is asking to sell them at 0.1 so that is their value because you could buy them at 0.1. To argue that they are too expensive is such an overbloated argument that it is useless, and furthermore calling me a liar over this semantic issue is despicable. Who cares if the next tick down is zero? You focus on arguing back & forth over this issue and yet you overlook the fact that Hunter contracts are a bargain. You went out of your way to get onto this ridiculous issue so that you could show Hunter’s contracts in the most negative light possible, that somehow the market considers them worthless. But here I am pointing out that there’s an entirely untapped market of buyers for these contracts: Hunter supporters. So by trying to attract and inject a whole new group of Intraders there would be buyers for those contracts, and they could get the ball rolling. Yes, they could. Your argument is that the existing players haven’t rolled the ball. My argument is that a bunch of Hunter supporters could roll this ball and make some money. It is not a lie, and by calling me a liar you have shown yourself to be pathetic.

One final point: There is some dead certain money to be made on the Intrade exchange, and that is in shorting Ron Paul. The profit will be small, but is a dead certain lock.
***I agree. If there were any group I would suspect of trying to manipulate the market, it would be the Paulestinians, and that is what I suspected when the price for Paul was 9 freeping dollars when he was still sort of an asterisk in the polls. But then he made $4M in one day and the whole episode was greeted with a yawn at Intrade. So it probably was not a market manipulation.

I will be copying this post and others onto the Duncan Hunter Smart Money thread, and my future responses to this thread over these topics will be over at that other thread.

153 posted on 11/16/2007 10:05:09 PM PST by Kevmo (We should withdraw from Iraq — via Tehran. And Duncan Hunter is just the man to get that job done.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 151 | View Replies | Report Abuse ]


312 posted on 11/16/2007 10:08:05 PM PST by Kevmo (We should withdraw from Iraq — via Tehran. And Duncan Hunter is just the man to get that job done.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 311 | View Replies ]


To: Kevmo

A sampling of the controversy.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1926425/posts?page=154#154

To: John Valentine
Here. I found where what I was saying was basically acknowledged by someone who says he was a former stock trader.

It disproves your contention explicitly. This is the 2nd time in a few days I’ve been called a liar on this forum by Thompson supporters, and the last one basically withdrew the accusation with a one-sentence change in my post that did not change the meaning at all, it was just semantics.

ko

Intrade

Joined: 03/11/2007 19:01:54
Messages: 32
Offline

Tozikio wrote:

I think Huckabee and Paul are taking support
from Fred. These are the people who are looking
for “something or someone else” — they thought
they’d find it in Thompson, and didn’t.

On the ideology scale, Hunter is closer than Huckabee or Paul. That is only New Hampshire polling data, and that state has its own strange political mixture. There’s a thread right here at Intrade discussing Hunter and the possibility of gaining traction.

https://bb.intrade.com/intradeForum/posts/list/1797.page

He’s polling at 3-4%, which is a bump up from what Delphi called Asteriskville. I would expect to see some liquidity in the Hunter contracts coming up pretty soon.

15/11/2007 13:08:00 Subject: Re:Thompson is tanking. Why?
Tozikio

Intrade

Joined: 22/09/2007 23:58:21
Messages: 100
Online
You’re right in an objective sense. But I think in the
early stages of the primary, the voters themselves
don’t know what they want. Thompson had created
a chameleon-like reputation before entering the race.
He could be anything to anybody since it wasn’t
clear how he would campaign.

Independent leaning Republicans had already
decided against the early announced and best
funded candidates. The fall of McCain was known even
before Thompson entered. It was assumed that Thompson
could vacuum up all the dissatisfied voters.

In a nutshell, Thompson had the “support” of the soft,
window shopping voters back in early September. People
are making up their minds now and drifting elsewhere.

I also agree that New Hampshire is a quirky place. But
Thompson needs to show some reasonable mass appeal.
If he gets single digits there, it could affect his results in
South Carolina.

148 posted on 11/16/2007 8:00:21 PM PST by Kevmo (We should withdraw from Iraq — via Tehran. And Duncan Hunter is just the man to get that job done.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 144 | View Replies | Report Abuse ]


To: John Valentine
The only issue I have been trying to drill into is that Hunter’s contract on Intrade at 10 cents is not selling because there are no buyers for it at this price, and no sellers at the next tick down, which is ZERO - a free good. If a signficantly smaller tick value could be introduced, the contracts WOULD trade, although, contrary to your fevered expectations, they would trade DOWN.
***Then how can you accuse me of lying? My theory was that a person could put $100 down on Hunter today and if his Intrade #’s started tracking the polling data (Ron Paul and Huckabee the 2 most recent examples), the guy would get 40X return on investment, and in order to get 40X return on Fred you’d have to go for the whole kit & kaboodle. All you are saying is that his contracts are valued low, and my response to that was “COOL”. I still say it looks like a bargain. There is no lie there.

This has nothing whatever to do with the silly crap on the Intrade Froum or your silly crap here. I tried to explain to you why there aren’t any buyers for Hunter’s contract(essentially it’s overpriced), but you only response was that I don’t know what I’m talking about and I should look at the Intrade forum to see how the experts there would savage my position.
***And I found evidence that they agree with what I say. That means what I’m writing is not a lie.

So I looked and while the general level of comment there is a notch or so above yours, NO POSTER on Intrade is trying to sell the nonsense that the reason Hunter’s Contract is not selling is because it is undervalued. Such a comment on a trader’s forum would instantly become the butt of some serious humor.
***The point you’re driving her is some kind of semantics issue, isn’t it? I think that’s what happens when someone posts an analysis like mine and the data seems to correlate but it doesn’t look good for a certain candidate. That’s why the last freeper called me a liar over semantics and I think you’re doing the same. It is evidence that the Thompson campaign is falling apart.

So, again, you lied. And you continue to lie.
***And I have PROVED that I did not lie, quoting directly from that forum that you said not a single post supported my theory.

149 posted on 11/16/2007 8:07:39 PM PST by Kevmo (We should withdraw from Iraq — via Tehran. And Duncan Hunter is just the man to get that job done.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 144 | View Replies | Report Abuse ]


To: John Valentine
Now I am going to get personal.
***The rules on this forum are very explicit, no personal attacks.

You are contemptible because you revel in your own ignorance. Of all human frailties this is the worst. Admission of ignorance is the first step in education, and you aren’t willing to take even that first step.
***If the reader will go over to the original thread
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1926032/posts?q=1&;page=251
the reader will see that in post ~300-306 or so I basically identified logical fallacy after fallacy and, for the first time I’ve ever seen it, a true straw argument within a straw argument. Your contention that I’m ignorant was shot down over there when your buddy tried to do it on that thread, and I’ve proved to you that my theory is supported over at Intrade. You are the contemptible one here, calling someone a liar over semantics because it doesn’t look good for Thompson.

It would actually be a good thing for yo to be banned from Free Republic again. Your absence would definitely raise the average level of debate.
***likewise, prince.

150 posted on 11/16/2007 8:14:19 PM PST by Kevmo (We should withdraw from Iraq — via Tehran. And Duncan Hunter is just the man to get that job done.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 144 | View Replies | Report Abuse ]

To: Kevmo
To repeat, and now with the evidence to back me up posted so kindly by you:

There is NOT ONE POST there that supports your stand-it-on-its head theory that there are no buyers for Hunter’s contract at 10 cents because it is overvalued.

All there is is the same kind of navel gazing introspection and theorizing about how such a great candidate Duncan Hunter is and how he - for no good reason - has been going exactly nowhere.

But, again, there is NOTHING, not one post in support of your BS.

So, you are now self-exposed as not only a fool, but a liar as well.

140 posted on 11/16/2007 7:03:49 PM PST by John Valentine
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 138 | View Replies | Report Abuse ]


To: John Valentine
You are the liar. I recently went round & round with another Thompson supporter who was calling me a liar. He eventually said that what I was posting was not a lie, I agreed to change ONE SENTENCE. See if you can tell the difference.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1922961/posts?page=36#36

Yeah, this Thompson campaign is definitely showing signs of imploding. Look at how you guys operate.

Here’s another set of posts. Note what Delphi has to say.

Maybe you could wander on over to the Fred Forum and post what is said there. When I touched on that third rail, it was the ONLY time I’ve ever been suspended from Free Republic.

ko

Intrade

Joined: 03/11/2007 19:01:54
Messages: 32
Offline
Hunter is at 4% in this Angus-Reid poll, and at least one other poll this week.

http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/view/28889/republicans_2008_giuliani_28_thompson_19

09/11/2007 08:21:42 Subject: Duncan Hunter gaining traction?
GAW838

Intrade

Joined: 10/09/2007 01:39:47
Messages: 77
Offline
I think immigration is an issue that can kill a candidacy, but can’t necessarily launch one.

In part, this is because it is very important to a certain minority of voters who have hard line against what they call amnesty.

If it didn’t matter at all, McCain would be doing a lot better.

I don’t think that’s the whole explanation though. It seems to me, at least this cycle, like issues have not really been important in driving anyone’s candidacy, save Ron Paul. Certainly, some issue positions have been a way for candidates to engage with one another and score points, but not really competitive candidate has risen due to his stance on a particular issue.

Moreover, even in an environment where a candidate can ride a single issue to the top, he still needs more stature than Hunter had coming into this campaign. So, I remain unsurprised and don’t really see a phenomenon searching for a new explanation so much as a natural consequence of existing assumptions.

Once again, there’s a reason Hunter’s candidacy was greeted with a combination of yawns and ‘really He’s running?’ responses, most people never took him seriously and for good reason.

09/11/2007 13:29:16 Subject: Duncan Hunter gaining traction?
Tozikio

Intrade

Joined: 22/09/2007 23:58:21
Messages: 100
Online

GAW838 wrote:

It seems to me, at least this cycle, like issues have not really been important in driving anyone’s candidacy

To be honest, I have felt like the Republicans have been dog-paddling the presidency since 1988. Reagan really ran on a set of ideas that stirred people. He could appeal to their patriotism and confidence.

Since then, Willie Horton, Flag Burning, Gays in the Military, Gay Marriage, “Family Values” were the “defining” campaign themes on the Repub side. Reagan had put together a right-leaning coalition of southerners and westerners which was large enough to simply allow “governing from the base” and not bother to reach out or even “think” too much. What the heck was a compassionate conservative or a thousand points of light supposed to be anyway? These were mushy themes.

The candidates seem more pale every cycle, and I think the Republicans have “lost the middle”. And that doesn’t mean voters are happy with the Dems either. I think that’s why the Bloomberg 3rd party contract gets bids in the teens and twenties. Intraders can sense this problem. The ennui of this election is palpable, and people are not ready propel any of the condidates. They’re just going to hold their noses again!

Having said that, I know there is complaining every year about the nomination process. Usually the nominee gains some stature after his acceptance speech.

09/11/2007 18:41:12 Subject: Re:Duncan Hunter gaining traction?
Delphi

Intrade

Joined: 11/09/2007 06:28:38
Messages: 106
Online
Actually ko, Hunter’s been drawing 3-4% in most polls during the past 2-3 weeks, so there’s a measurable support out there for him. How he cuts through the busy but low-key media buzz of other second-tier candidates like Huckabee and Paul (although I note that a week ago Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post put Huckabee at #3 ahead of McCain and Thompson) is a bit questionable right now.

141 posted on 11/16/2007 7:06:45 PM PST by Kevmo (We should withdraw from Iraq — via Tehran. And Duncan Hunter is just the man to get that job done.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 139 | View Replies | Report Abuse ]


To: John Valentine
Here you go. Why would Intraders be talking about measurable support and how that translates into Intrade results? Because it is pertinent, and it does support what my stand-on-head theory as you call it.

Delphi:
Actually ko, Hunter’s been drawing 3-4% in most polls during the past 2-3 weeks, so there’s a measurable support out there for him.

142 posted on 11/16/2007 7:09:09 PM PST by Kevmo (We should withdraw from Iraq — via Tehran. And Duncan Hunter is just the man to get that job done.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 140 | View Replies | Report Abuse ]


To: John Valentine
And now that you have posted this example here for everyone to see, there won’t be any question abbout who is telling the truth and who is the liar.
***Where do you think I got the idea and the material for my post? From these forum posts at Intrade. You’re just mad that it makes your candidate look bad. I can see why. It’s devastating.

143 posted on 11/16/2007 7:19:48 PM PST by Kevmo (We should withdraw from Iraq — via Tehran. And Duncan Hunter is just the man to get that job done.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 139 | View Replies | Report Abuse ]


313 posted on 11/16/2007 10:12:49 PM PST by Kevmo (We should withdraw from Iraq — via Tehran. And Duncan Hunter is just the man to get that job done.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 312 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson