Intrade is useless as a predictive tool. It is moves in response to published polls, with the exception of the last few hours before a local election.
For instance, Romney and McCain (in Florida) have fluctuated over the last 3 days between 40 and 60. They move every time a poll is released, they’ll probably settle in around 50 / 50 until tommorrow.
IF their is some notable event that makes news, but us too late to show up in the polls - it could move intrade in the final moments, but it’s completely useless as an indicator of November elections.
Polls aren’t as accurate as prediction markets.
The Efficacy Of Prediction Markets The Liberty Papers ^ |
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1922961/posts
The funny thing I see, over and over and over is that some freeper points out that “on some particular incident X, the Prediction Markets got it wrong” as if that somehow negates the overall effectiveness of Prediction Markets versus Poll Results.
But in this election cycle, the process was taken one step further. Poll results are generated by the MSM, and the MSM demonstrates a huge liberal bias and they obviously tilted the polls to show anticonservative results. Those polls were used to exclude the most conservative candidate from the debates in the EARLIEST PRIMARIES. So, we had biased media conducting biased polls and using that biased data to exclude the candidate they didn’t like, even though he had won a delegate and some of those jerks who had higher poll results hadn’t a single delegate to their name.
On Poll Results and the End of Conservatism
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1951282/posts