Unicast

My first payment to TradeSports, the premier no-limit prediction market/betting exchange, which is based in Ireland, finally went through, and I put in my first order, which was to buy 5 contracts for Republican control of the House of Representatives in 2006 at $7.2.

A couple of observations:

• It's not possible to place orders in Safari or Firefox.
• The user interface is absolutely horrible.
• Navigation is a mess: How do I get a listing of my current open orders?
• The account overview page does not separate amounts reserved for open orders and for open positions.
• There is very little liquidity.
• Spreads are astronomical. Well, pretty large, currently 3.4% of bid-ask midpoint in the contract I'm trying to buy.
• Prices are quoted from 0 to 100, but actual dollar amount per contract is one tenth of this. Huh?

The site may not be so impossible to use once you get used to it, but it amazes me that a market with such a poor interface can ever yield good predictions.

Posted by Guan Yang at 04:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Just secured an invitation to the Mini-Conference on Information and Prediction Markets in London on December 19th organized by Marco Ottaviani. Ticket booked.

Still haven't been able to locate a good, cheap hotel with WiFi that is reasonable close to London Business School. I asked Nick about this, and he told me that London is such a nasty place that he tries to avoid staying the night there at any cost. He suggested that I simply rent a windowless cubicle at easyHotel.

Posted by Guan Yang at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Stephen Taylor: "In demonising our governments and businesses we are children blaming an imaginary evil twin. It is our dark side these organisations manifest, knowing they will be rewarded if they keep their unsavoury work out of sight, and allow us to bask in the sunlight of our own self-approval.

"It is our greed and fears our governments and businesses represent when negotiating the terms of trade that keep so much of the planet in poverty. We can enjoy the moral buzz of deprecating all this but nothing changes until we first acknowledge and then refuse our complicity in it. It is our heel that grinds the world’s poor. The cloak of 'market forces' provides a disguise sufficient only to our self deceptions.

"We strut on the world’s stage crowing our nobility, democracy and good intentions, oblivious to the evil that we do."

I saw The Constant Gardener too and thought it was a pretty good movie. But I really hope that viewers saw the film, and the book, as good entertainment and not a documentary work or one of advocacy.

Posted by Guan Yang at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I just used my Bank of America Visa card for the first time, and the transaction showed up in the online banking system immediately! No Danish banks can do that.

Posted by Guan Yang at 08:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Andrew Meyer (via Rebecca MacKinnon): "He explained that the situation today was analogous to the days of the early Roman Empire. Though the Christians had been a tiny, persecuted minority then they eventually were able to convert the entire realm, and the people and government of Taiwan would transform China through a comparably subtle organic process."

Posted by Guan Yang at 07:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

SSE looks interesting. I might try to create a demo app when I have time.

Posted by Guan Yang at 07:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Next semester I'm taking two finance courses at the Mathematics Department creatively named "Finance 1" and "Finance 2". Finance 1 is an introductory finance course for mathematicians, while Fin2 is a more advanced topical course whose topic changes every time it's offered. Because of the peculiarities of timetables at the Economics Department, I had to commit to taking Fin2 before I knew what the topic was.

The topic has been announced now; it will be Mortgage Backed Securities. Content is stochastic interest rate models, American option pricing, callable bonds, prepayment models, exotic embedded options and mortgage portfolio choice. This is probably more difficult than some of the topics they could have chosen, like corporate finance, but I'm still optimistic that I can get a good grade.

Posted by Guan Yang at 06:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

For those who read Isaac Newton by Jim Gleick and found it good but too short and skimpy on the details, there's Richard S. Westfall's definitive scientific biography, Never at Rest.

Posted by Guan Yang at 06:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Joi Ito: "I've been mistaken for a women by various bloggers, but this is the first time I've made it on a 10 most XYZ Women in ABC list."

Posted by Guan Yang at 05:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In the United States District Court for the Northern District of Alabama (pdf, via Howard Bashman): "The reason offered for the motion is that defense counsel did not realize he would be on his honeymoon on December 19, 2005, until after receipt of the court's prior order rescheduling oral arguments for that date. The court is glad that counsel finally recognized the conflict and rightly presumed that the court would be more predisposed to change its schedule than defense counsel's bride would be to postpone or forego the honeymoon. The motion is GRANTED with the court's congratulations to defense counsel.

Posted by Guan Yang at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This page contains a diagram of the West Wing floor plan. I'm a bit disappointed that the Chief of Staff's office is not adjacent to the Oval Office, like in the real West Wing.

Posted by Guan Yang at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

S.M. Oliva: "Since the day he left law school, Alito has been on the federal government's payroll without interruption. It's telling that conservatives have embraced and hailed Alito's nomination as a victory for their cause. Is the right sending the message that one's highest duty is service to the state?"

Posted by Guan Yang at 01:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Professor Jesper Jespersen taler om emnet den 25. november i St. Øvelsessal, Økonomisk Institut, Studiestræde 6, 2. sal. Arrangementet er gratis. Læs mere her.

Professor Jespersen har skrevet bogen John Maynard Keynes som en del af serien "Økonomiens konger" fra Jurist- og Økonomforbundets Forlag. Han har senest været kendt for hans kraftige kritik af Velfærdskommissionens metoder og arbejde.

[en] This is the 1337th post on Unicast!

Posted by Guan Yang at 12:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This BBC article from 1999 (link from somewhere on Crooked Timber) discusses the London Stock Exchange's transition to an automated open limit order book (continuous double auction) market mechanism. Because of such a mechanism's liquidity problems — conventional wisdom says that, in the absence of a loss-making market maker — an open limit order book only works if there is significant two-way trading beforehand.

When it launched in London in 1997, the book only covered the companies in the FTSE 100 index.

Posted by Guan Yang at 12:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

F65, Financial Models in Excel, is a pretty popular course at Copenhagen Business School. Apparently they've stopped having lectures. Instead the teacher, Peter Raahauge, records his lectures with Camtasia Studio and has open office hours. See an example.

Posted by Guan Yang at 12:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Instead of bookmarking stuff, just blog it immediately.

Instead of writing a note, just blog it immediately.

Always keep MarsEdit open.

Posted by Guan Yang at 12:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Paul Graham has a long, informative article on how startups are funded: "This article is meant to be a complete summary of funding options for startup founders. In effect we're open-sourcing the kernel of what we tell founders about funding at Y Combinator."

Posted by Guan Yang at 12:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This search on Audible returns what appears to be all of the Feynman Lectures on Physics. Now I just need $924 to buy all of it, though I'd still be stuck with their DRM.

Posted by Guan Yang at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

captchaservice.org is a cool service that provides captchas for lazy programmers who can't be bothered to write their own code. You fetch an XML document which contains a URL to an image hosted on their site and the embedded word itself.

Posted by Guan Yang at 11:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Big Picture: "David Jackson of the Seeking Alpha Blog Network has pulled a little outsourcing of his own. He paid a company in India to transcribe the conference calls of major public US companies, he is making the transcripts available for free."

Posted by Guan Yang at 11:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I might be getting involved in a prediction markets project soon. Here's some of my preliminary research.

The grand old lady of electronic prediction markets is Iowa Electronic Markets, a real-money market run by the business school at the University of Iowa, which claims to have provided better predictions of US presidential winners than opinion polls since 1988. There is a $500 deposit limit and a $500 limit per bet. The market structure is a continuous double auction.

Even in markets with binary outcomes, IEM has two contracts and a mechanism where they can be bought and sold in unit bundles at $1, thus splitting liquidity. In a wonderful series of posts, Daniel Davies offers some analysis and criticism of IEM. In this post he does some calculations on the Kerry '04 winner-takes-all contract and finds that in the Black-Scholes model, the Kerry contract is overvalued in such a way that there is no value of implied volatility for which the contract could be correctly priced.

The Foresight Exchange is one of the oldest prediction markets online and also runs a continuous double auction, but only has a single contract in each outcome that can be shorted. Its user interface is absolutely horrible, but it seems to be relatively popular because anyone can create new contracts.

NewsFutures is a prediction market with a slightly better design, run by a company that has a Java/PostgreSQL-based platform for prediction markets. They're the ones who set up the Yahoo! Buzz Game.

The Yahoo! Buzz Game does not use a strict continuous double auction, but rather a "dynamic pari-mutuel market" (pdf) mechanism, which is somewhat like a pari-mutuel market like the ones typically used for horse betting (more on this in a later post), but where there the price can reflect new information. (In a regular pari-mutuel market the price of each bet is fixed.) Unlike continuous double auctions, a dynamic pari-mutuel market can provide the infinite liquidity that is the chief advantage of pari-mutuel markets, and requires only a fixed subsidy by the market operator. (Continuous double auctions can have good liquidity if there is a market maker, but the market maker could incur substantial losses.)

Robin Hanson of George Mason University is one of the leading academic scholars working on prediction markets. He sits on the scientific advisory board of NewsFutures. He also had a role in the Pentagon's Policy Analysis Market.

I will probably blog more about this in the future.

Posted by Guan Yang at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

New Orleans Times-Picayune (via Dave Winer): "Great cities are made by their place and their people, their beauty and their risk. Water flows around and through most of them. And one of the greatest bodies of water in the land flows through this one: the Mississippi. The federal government decided long ago to try to tame the river and the swampy land spreading out from it. The country needed this waterlogged land of ours to prosper, so that the nation could prosper even more."

Posted by Guan Yang at 11:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today I switched to SpamSieve for my spam filtering needs, replacing the built-in filter in Mail.app. It's working pretty well so far, though I don't get much mail on Saturdays:

Filtered Mail
38 Good Messages
129 Spam Messages (77%)
265 Spam Messages Per Day

SpamSieve Accuracy
3 False Positives
0 False Negatives (0%)
98.2% Correct

Corpus
93 Good Messages
217 Spam Messages (70%)
15571 Total Words

Posted by Guan Yang at 09:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Eszter Hargittai has an excellent post at Crooked Timber.

Posted by Guan Yang at 03:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Choosing Your Workflow Applications (pdf) by Kieran Healy of Crooked Timber is an excellent guide to the workflow applications that Kieran uses. In particular I'm intrigued by Sweave, a literate programming framework that uses noweb syntax to allow you to mix L^AT_EX and R code in the same document. Sweave then runs the R bits, inserts appropriate numbers, tables and figures, into a document that can be run through L^AT_EX. Numbers and graphs will then be automagically updated if the underlying data changes.

Posted by Guan Yang at 03:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I just received my Adam Smith cufflinks. They look great!

Posted by Guan Yang at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

more photos from guan

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Imagethief: "5) Raise the specter of government incompetence: Now the Chinese government has arrived in Choukeng to manage a cull of sick poultry. But instead of helping, they may be making the problem worse. Local officials are using compensation money provided by the central government and intended for farmers to stage bloody, baijiu-lubricated cockfights and to build the world's largest, free-standing concrete chicken statue in a bid to attract more tourists to the impoverished region."

Posted by Guan Yang at 02:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

OBS: Debatten er aflyst. Beklager!

Bor du i Københavns Kommune? Vidste du at der er kommunalvalg den 15. november?

I den forbindelse arrangerer Politrådet en debat mellem spidskandidaterne (undtagen Søren Pind) på onsdag den 9. november.

Tid og sted:
Økonomisk Institut, Bispetorvet 3, 1167 København K, Alexandersalen
Onsdag den 9. november kl. 16-18

Posted by Guan Yang at 04:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

On behalf of the Danish People, an Emigration Event has been organized for Citizen David Heinemeier Hansson on the occasion of his imminent emigration to the United States as an Extraordinary Alien.

Read details on Lars Pind's blog. David will give his official Emigration Lecture, in which he leave behind the knowledge he has attained while a Danish citizen, after which the rest of us will drink the official Emigration Mead.

Monday, November 14th, at 20:00 in Admiral Gjeddes Gaard in central Copenhagen. Be there. Sign up at Pind's blog.

Posted by Guan Yang at 02:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Before going to the US three weeks ago I decided on a lark to register for the GRE. I got the results yesterday – verbal 610 (86th percentile), quantitative 690 (66th percentile), analytical writing 5.5 (86th percentile). Overall I'm pretty satisfied because I didn't prepare at all, but I'm told that a quantitative score of at least 750 is necessary for grad school.

Posted by Guan Yang at 02:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Costco is selling caskets and urns mail order. For overnight shipping, you must order by 2pm EST.

Posted by Guan Yang at 02:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)