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Notes -
More prediction markets stuff.
On /r/slatestarcodex there's actually a decent discussion of the prediction markets weirdness we've been seeing. It does turn out that there was probably a whale who bought enough Trump shares to increase the price from 50 to 60 over a number of days.
But, far from being an attempt at manipulation, this is actually a savvy trader who saw that the new Trump poll numbers had not yet been reflected in the election odds and took advantage of that. In the days since, Trump's Polymarket odds have crystalized at around 60% as traders have digested the new consensus. But if this was manipulation, it would require a constant influx of new capital to maintain the price of 60.
So what would manipulation look like?
Well, we actually saw it last night, when the price of Trump shares had a flash crash to 55 before quickly recovering to 60. This movement has all the hallmarks of manipulation.
It took place during the wee hours of Sunday morning, the lowest liquidity time of the week
The price immediately rebounded back to 60 as traders took advantage of the mispricing
Odds for individual states did NOT shift in concert with Harris's national odds
My guess is that someone in the vein of Reid Hoffman bought the manipulation story enough to try a counter-manipulation of their own, rapidly lost a few hundred thousand dollars and then bailed.
Takeaway: Polymarket is more robust than many people gave it credit for.
Here's a genuine thought I had about a tactic that is probably illegal but might not have been tried yet:
What is somebody 'gifted' $100 worth of Trump "yes" shares to friends and family who might be on the fence (and residing in swing states), with absolutely ZERO strings attached... but the shares do not vest/aren't directly accessible until after the election (so they can't just sell them and turn right around and buy Harris). You give them no instructions, make no requests, and in fact refuse to state who you support/are voting for if pressed. So while the implication of what you're doing is clear, and they can probably figure out the incentives, you have made no statements which would implicate intentions to buy votes to bring about a particular political outcome.
The chances of getting arrested for trying this must be near 100%. And the strat is easily countered if some other party distributes an equivalent value of Harris shares. But I am genuinely curious if there is some way to structure things to make it financially profitable for an otherwise 'undecided' swing state voter to acquire shares for each candidate and trade them using solely the knowledge that their own vote will have some real chance of impacting the outcome.
Also:
Is it theoretically possible for a prediction market to generate a real life preference cascade in favor of a given candidate? It seems like it could happen as people realize the money is beginning to heavily favor one over the other, and they, too, can turn a profit if they buy in and vote for the apparently-dominant candidate.
If anyone's trying market manipulation, that would be a possible goal... but I don't think prediction markets are relevant enough to have that kind of impact... yet.
Can't wait until the 2026 elections when candidates will have financial analysts on staff to interpret market swings and respond instantly to shifts in their own chances of victory. Pleasing the market will suddenly become more important that merely polling well.
Also can't wait until the first time a candidate gets assassinated solely because someone has a HUGE bet riding on them losing an election.
I will say that a Trump win sitting at 60-66% chances FEELS right to me.
I keep saying that Kamala can't maintain popularity without the media pulling all the weight for her. She is, personally, very unimpressive and can come across as straight up insincere at best, and utterly out of her depth at worst. Bad product, good marketing. But the marketing is starting to crack, indeed some journos seem to be breaking ranks a bit (not in the tank for Trump, mind). The more she does off-script appearances the worse impression she gives off.
I genuinely think she might have had a better chance doing Biden's 2020 strat of hiding in basement most of the time.
So in short, she's got the die-hard Dem base + the anti-Trump brigade on lock, but I think she utterly lacks cross-demographic appeal AND has been boxed in by the dueling demands of demographics they DO have support from, such that any attempts to outreach sincerely to outgroups will be interpreted as defection.
I also expect the markets to narrow in a bit as we come closer to the election and people decide to close out their positions at a marginal profit rather than actually take the dice roll. If somebody bought a bunch of Trump shares at ~45-50% and can sell them for 55-60% that's a decent profit for a short period trade.
If anybody rolls into election night holding substantial Trump Win shares they bought back in late July or even August, I will commend them for having tremendous balls and/or diamond hands.
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Polymarket is not legal to trade for USAians. Do we follow it for sport, or do we have "other methods" of participating?
Kalshi currently has 'legal' Election markets available to only U.S. citizens.
Scare quotes are because the case itself is still pending but the courts aren't preventing them from running the markets in the meantime.
If you want to participate in Polymarket specifically, that's just a matter of understanding a few of the technicalities of Crypto.
I saw earlier today when I logged on that IBKR is advertising "Forecast Contracts" on the election. Seems to be a new thing, might toss some cash toward it.
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Use crypto, they physically can't stop you.
They can't stop you, as is the case with most laws, but they can punish you afterwards.
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https://x.com/IAPolls2022
Latest Nate Silver polls are Trump 55, so it seems that polymarket picks up trends (and is noisier) somewhat faster than the model. Or that Nate Silver has slight Harris bias.
I don't think that polymarket can be manipulated (delusional yes though) - it is too niche to move voters.
What is interesting is that the media is moving slowly against her - I think that this is just a backfire of not giving at least token respect to the journalists/keyfabe. But coronations have risks. I think that Biden's Kamala endorsement was just a brilliant fuck you to obama.
55% vs 60% sounds like a pretty normal difference in estimating likelihood of low frequency events that both add up to 'this thing is more likely but not so much so that the other happening would be a shock'. I wouldn't call it evidence of major differences between models or evidence of bias.
Didn't imply anything of the sort - just that nate just made a post about polymarket overestimating Trump and then his trends moved into the same direction, just a day or two later - so lets see if it will get to 60 in next few days.
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Yeah, markets are a leading indicator.
If Silver only looks at the current polls without looking at momentum, his predictions are going to be slightly late and wrong. In the era of true betting markets, there is no longer much value to Silver's data aggregation methods. Even though he has one of the best models, the market will do a better job still.
Silver is also a biased Kamala supporter who tends to tweet about positive Kamala polls more than negative ones. But I trust him enough to say that he will ignore his biases and go where the data leads.
Nate Silver's analysis is upstream of the Polymarket prices, in the sense that everyone who trades serious amounts of money on Polymarket is reading Nate Silver and either agrees with him or has a good reason for disagreeing.
Both polls of superforecasters and prediction markets are ways of aggregating a range of information including the opinions of bona fide subject matter experts (which Nate Silver is), not a substitute for subject matter expertise.
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I've seen some recent podcasts where Silver is a guest and he seems to think the blue tribe still underestimate Trump. If he is a Democrat, at least he's taken his blinkers off.
Silver is tentatively on my very short "Good Pundits" list in that he seems to honestly eschew bias in his prognostications and is completely willing to tell his own side when they are being utterly stupid.
His willingness to throw down bets on his own arguments is also promising.
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To his credit, he's open about his bias.
Yes. I see him as a fundamentally honest person who is more resistant to groupthink than the standard Cathedral member. His behavior during the pandemic reinforced this belief in me.
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I'm not really following the happenings, what did he do, and how was it an FU to Obama?
Bident endorsed Kamala instantly. Obama delayed his endorsement almost a week. The rumor mill was that: Bident was threatened with 25th section 4 if he doesn't drop. Eventually he folded. Obama was considering her slightly less charismatic, skilled, electable, and competent than a 2x4 piece of lumber. His plan was to have a mini convention and then someone that is not fucking kamala harris - to come forward. And biden immediate endorsement threw mightily off the rails those plans, so Obama wing were stuck with a candidate that will make their lives harder.
Because someone like Mark Kelly would have wiped the floor with trump without breaking a sweat.
Would Biden really gun for a Trump victory in order to defeat his real enemy, Obama?
He wouldn't be gunning for a Trump victory, he'd be absolving himself of the blame for a Democratic defeat.
Regardless of what Obama may or may not have intended a convention to go, two of the facts that were critical to Kamala's consolidation of being nominee was (1) her head start on all other candidates with her campaign media (some starting the Sunday after the Saturday-ish media covering Biden's step down, meaning all the other main political rivals and their support staff were home for the weekend), and (2) her legal inheritance of the Biden campaign war chest. The later of these was already known and being speculated about even before Biden's resignation, and the former was clearly pre-planned at the time given the dynamics of the surge flooding the media space. Again, no matter what Obama or others might have wanted, these dynamics were already in play and smothered potential for a viable convention.
What a Biden endorsement of Kamala does is flip the script of the pre-stepdown narrative of Biden as the responsible actor with agency (if Biden loses this, he put himself before the Party) to Biden as the non-primary agent (Biden ultimately put the Party before himself). This puts the agency in the actors/leaders of the Party who led the confrontation- namely, Obama and Pelosi among others. Except Pelosi has already largely retired from active politics (and is very old), whereas Obama specifically lives in the DC area to remain engaged in party politics.
Whereas a contested political convention might have produced an absolving 'well, no one's at fault especially not me' dynamic (or, more plausibly, everyone blaming eachother, but not one specific person in general), and Kamala coronation puts the agency/responsibility for the results of that one the part of those who arranged it- which goes back to the Obama wing of the party. Note further that Obama never actually publicly opposed Kamala, so any post-defeat gripings would be significantly undercut by his agency in putting her in the position in the first place.
Bringing this back to Biden, there's basically a political binary after supporting Harris. Either Kamala wins- in which he has backed the winning horse / has a higher relative influence than he would have had he held out / Kamala's favors to him likely include the protection of his political dynastic interests- or Kamala loses. If Kamala loses, however, the fault is not his- it's either whoever failed to support her (if a key wing of the party rebels), or it's the fault of whoever put her in the first place (the Party leaders who ejected him). The Obama wing of the party suffers whatever intangible consequences there are of having backed three losing candidates (Hillary, Harris, and Biden who they themselves ousted) and bringing Trump into office twice.
It might be to the Party and/or Obama's interest that Biden have not supported Harris in a purely 'Trump minimization' perspective... but this route is also a route in which Biden could also be blamed for a failed convention (which itself could be a defeat condition), which would serve Obama's political interests but hardly Biden's. And also if the party actually wanted a Trump-minimization strategy in the first place, there were many other things they could have done over the last few years other than pave the road for MAGA's return.
Thanks for the explanation, it was a real head-scratcher to me how anyone could be upset at his endorsement, but it makes sense now. Though it's some real Game of Thrones shit, and more cunning then I'd expect from an 80 year old man.
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Yeah I don’t think Biden disliked Obama that much historically but it’s easy to see why he might feel very betrayed at being essentially forced out.
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