InTrade Nominee Advice
For the top four US presidential candidates from each party, InTrade.com gives these chances of nomination, becoming president, and the implied conditional chance of winning if nominated:
Al Gore’s conditional chances seem way out of line to me. And Ron Paul’s conditional chances are suspiciously large compared to the other Republicans.
Added: What good are estimates that could be better? I know of no other source of daily-updated estimates with even a similar accuracy. And here anyone can be paid to fix any errors they find.
I was tipped off to this play, and arbitraged this (with a small amount of money) many months ago.
Note that the margin requirements are sort of crappy, you have to put up your full potential loss a few months before the event. So the shorting half of the play has a pretty significant opportunity cost.
Don't read too much into what amounts to random statistical noise. Markets tend to towards accuracy, but at any given moment, they're wildly inaccurate. As Benjamin Graham noted a long time ago: In the short-term, a market is a voting machine. In the long run, it's a weighing machine.