"This has taught me a valuable lesson - regardless of what I think, when betting non-total lock contracts with good liquidity, lock in the picks. I could've gotten out at about 97 before the first results came in, which would have both locked up the profit *and* given me several thousand to speculate on various Election Night results with, almost certainly making up the 3 points on something or other. So, no more of that."


This is huge fwiw. It also saves you from overbetting your roll.

As a very very general rule there is a phase where it's value as everyone overreacts, and a phase where it's not value as people start locking in profits. Obviously that's up to you to find via feel.

Bad beat imo. I would have put my (small) roll on Obama. I'm surprised Clinton even wrote a victory speech.

Someone on Betfair laid 250-1 about Hillary. Only for $7 but wow they must be sick right now.

Update on how much Adanthar is down?

lols owned by historic poll failure

no change obv, nothing's gonna happen until Michigan (where I have some McCains and a ton of Clintons that, this time, I'm selling for 99 or w/e before polls close).

Romney is ahead on RCP though...

yeah, I'm not gonna sit on those until the 15'th if it's still too close to call. probably selling them if/when some poll has McCain up > 1.

The small chance that the polls would be wrong/change is why there existed a >0% chance Clinton would win and why your hold at 97 (or whatever it was) was not a 100% guarantee to be a winner. Things like this will eventually happen when you bet enough "sure things," I'm just surprised it happened to you immediately.

I'm not trying to rub salt in the wound (you of course won our RP bet so I'm not in much of a position to brag, and also you seem like a nice guy so I'd just as soon see you do well), I'm just saying, if you hold at 97 obviously it is gonna be some sort of rare occurrence that makes you lose, but that doesn't mean the play was necessarily a good one.

(You mentioned that looking back you should have sold it rather than rode it to the end, but I'm just speaking in general to the strategy of betting on big favorites, which is something you seem to like. My point is just that if you try to pick up "free money" by betting big favorites, the instances where you lose will always be some sort of wacky occurrence. The money against you reflects the possibility of this wacky occurrence. So saying "well that was a wacky occurrence" when the positions miss doesn't really mean anything. You seem to just be assuming these highly probable occurrences are 100% locks, and the 19 times out of 20 you win you'll think nothing of it or even reinforce the idea that it was a total lock, and then when something kooky happens you'll dismiss it as freakish bad luck, even though it would only be freakish bad luck if the return on the position wasn't so tiny. So I don't really see why you were owned by historic poll failure as much as you were owned by merely your decision not to sell at 97.)

Eh..I mean, you'd be totally right if, for example, Clinton loses MI to 'undeclared' - that would be freaky (IMO) but it could happen in theory and I'm probably right to sell early at 99. Obama.NH was very different. For starters, I bought all those Obama shares at an average of 75 right after IA, so it was by no means betting on a lock - I just anticipated a bounce and an upward trend for him in the polls, which did happen and continued to happen all the way through the rest of that week/I kept holding. By Tuesday morning, the 97/3 was solely the chance that every single poll was wrong and/or that Clinton would bounce back ~7-10 points in one day - you couldn't even get any action on Clinton if you wanted to. Okay, historic poll failures happen, they just don't happen 3% of the time.

it doesn't even matter much, I'm just saying this because you're kinda conflating strategies here. you *would* be correct if this also happens in MI, though.

I don't really get what you're saying here. I think there's very little chance Clinton loses in MI just like I thought there was very little chance she'd win NH on the day of the primary. I just don't/didn't think it was literally 0%.

Right but if you want to look at it that way then it was also not "owned by historic poll failure." It was "owned by Obama not beating Clinton with a week to play."

You can't take credit for the Obama bump, not sell because you remain confident that this will translate into a win, and then not bear responsibility for the Clinton comeback/chance of poll error. You're trying to pick and choose what occurrences are legitimate and which ones don't really count (meaning that you'll always see a loss as just bad luck).

No, they don't. But this is just one unique instance. The Clinton's are pretty crafty, and were desperate. Some of the biggest poll errors occur when a candidate is a minority. Women who might be emotionally drawn to Clinton might become so at the last minute. I don't think it's necessarily unreasonable to figure that Clinton.NH at 3 is a good buy.

basically, with no polls and nobody knowing what's going on in MI, it's possible, though very unlikely, that field > Hillary. the polls being what they were in NH, the only chance of Clinton winning was literally a historic poll failure. huge difference.

I mean, I don't wanna argue this too much cause of results, but this:

makes Clinton a horrible, horrible buy at 3 and only marginally less horrible at .3 unless you literally got the exit polls before anybody else.

Sure, but I don't see what this has to do with anything, or why my argument supposedly depends on Clinton losing in MI. Clinton.NH and Clinton.MI are, uh, different trials.

My argument implies that there is merely a non zero chance she will lose Michigan.

This isn't important though.

Or unless you anticipated that a desperate and savvy Clinton might move a bunch in the closing 1-3 day window as emotional women find a reason to turn out for her and as Obama seems to go into shutdown mode and/or you guess that this situation might be a tough one to poll accurately in the first place and/or you think vote fraud could occur, and you decide it's worth buying at 3?

I'm not even arguing that a line of 3 made sense to me or that I can explain exactly why Clinton.NH was a good prediction. I'm just arguing that the result is the result, and you can't imply "well I just got really unlucky there because of a freak poll error and there wasn't anything I could have done about it" when you held a 97 position, and the money against you was reflecting the possibility that there would be a huge poll error.

You seem to be suggesting that buying Clinton at 3 is not reasonable just because you personally don't see the reasoning behind it. This is why you think the market is so beatable. You're willing to say it was a horrible prediction even at 3% even after... it happened. I, like you, was stunned by what happened. But I say "well, the collection of everyone's actions in an open market is probably a better prediction than what I can come up with myself, so the 3% probably makes sense for some reason even if I don't know exactly why" rather than "betting on the outcome which, incidentally, ended up happening made 0 sense because I personally don't see how it possibly could."

EDIT: I'm not trying to say that this one sample is anything more than one sample. I'm just saying that the fact that it was a big polling error doesn't mean much of anything, because the price of the position was so high.

Other Intrade 3%+ shots at the time/now include:

-Barack Obama winning MI, although he's not on the ballot (pre-NH, this topped out at 18%)
-Dem.VP.Gore (constantly hovering at 10% - when Super Tuesday is done, this is what I'm shorting)
-Obama.FL currently at 35% (note that Florida also has no delegates, and the Dems all pledged not to campaign or air ads there, so when Obama's down 56/23 in the latest poll...yeah, that's about 30% of value.)

I mean, the market is simply and gloriously irrational. In fact, while Obama could be sold at 97 on election night, Clinton was going at 0.5, and that was solely because of the fee structure thing. So, yeah, my position remains that the market had nothing to do with that one.

anyway, gogogo MI

I don't really understand that post. But whatever, my post before it was kind of a tired ramble anyways. Clearly we disagree I guess.

When you take your profits from your Obama shorts tomorrow, put the money into South Carolina right away. Short Romney in SC if he wins tomorrow and consider long on McCain. I actually like long McCain in South Carolina now at 55 and if the early results tomorrow show a McCain win, try to get him at a decent price. Also short the GOP field in SC, which includes Huckabee. He's 8 points back now and finishing 3rd in Michigan isn't going to help.

Also, consider long on Edwards in Nevada. He's at 5 right now and the only current poll has him only 5 points behind Obama. With the unpredictability of the caucuses and the scanty polling data, I think he's around 20% to win.

I actually have about 50 GOP.Field.SC shares as a hedge to my McCain positions elsewhere (if he loses MI tomorrow they will rise) but assuming he wins, yes, I'm probably doing a bunch of that in between loading up on Clinton.FL.

btw, if McCain wins MI he has to be the overwhelming favorite to win the nomination IMO.

in anticipation of today, I set up a whole bunch of hedges for my main bets, which are gonna reduce profits somewhat...but it looks very nice on the whole. placing last minute bets on Romney now that CNN shows him that far up before a final tally.

basically autorefreshing and selling Obama/buying Hillary at 20/80 (and Romney for a free 5%) once the polls broke made me about $800.

doing the same thing right now in SC, although for far less profit because somebody was definitely insider trading on the exit poll %'s.

fun fact: some clown is currently buying Obama/shorting Hillary in Nevada and substantial action is going down at 80% and even 50% after the entire vote is already in. wtf.

whats the technical aspects of the bet? b/c obama is winning on delegates... I'm sure if you bet that Gore won in 2000 you wouldn't win either

Does winning a state mean gaining the most delegates from that states or winning the popular vote?

"A contract will settle (expire) at 100 ($10.00) if the individual named in the contract is announced winner of this primary / caucus."

nobody cares about delegates obv

before anybody tries to nitpick this, Obama's back trading at 1.x/HRC at 98.x, thus proving the 'lone moron' theory

well I hope youre right, but some guy made 4 billion last year betting against the housing market, and he was the "lone idiot"

What are you trying to say? What you quoted doesn't answer his question of whether "winning" the state is measured in votes or delegates. Do you know for sure they don't measure winning in delegates? What are you basing this off of? Obviously it seems the popular is what "counts," but I don't get why you quoted what you did or what you think it means. That sentence is just explaining the way a contract expires; not explaining what metric constitutes the "winner of the primary / caucus."

What florida bets u doing, adantharian one?