This is true. I have shares in all of them and they haven’t closed yet.
When a trader exits, more traders can join. If you keep trying, you can get into just about every contract. There are probably 20 markets or so that haven’t hit the cap yet, so those are available for trading.
I’ve posted this in a different thread, but I’ll post here so everyone can be on the same page.
538 produced a probabilistic forecast for each of the 56 electoral vote awarding entities (50 states, 5 congressional districts, and DC) every day from 6/1/2020 to 11/3/2020.
They make the forecast outputs available here: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-general-data/presidential_state_toplines_2020.csv
Similarly, PredictIt had a market for each of those 56 electoral vote awarding entities. While those markets are not a forecast in and of themselves, they can be used to create a forecast. One way to derive a forecast from a prediction market is described in David Rothschild’s 2009 paper from Public Opinion Quarterly, Forecasting Elections: Comparing Prediction Market, Polls, and Their Biases. The strength of this method is that it includes debiasing for favorite-longshot bias which is a well known weakness of prediction markets.
I collected data from PredictIt for each of these markets, using their api, going back to mid-April so I could create such a forecast.
You can find my forecast data here: PredictIt - Google Sheets
With each of those forecasts one can compute at any point in time the Mean Squared Error of that forecast compared to actual results. Here’s a plot of that comparison…
We can see that the PredictIt derived forecast has less error than 538’s forecast. In fact, PredictIt on its worst day was better than 538 on its best day.
You can claim that PredictIt was right for the wrong reasons, but it is an undeniable fact that the PredictIt derived forecast provided a more accurate picture of the final election results than 538 at every point leading up to the election.
Lance how many millions did you make with all the great betting knowledge?
I’ve never claimed to have great betting knowledge.
And if the election had leaned a little more towards Biden, then 538 would have been more accurate than Predictit on every single day. So it’s still only one data point.
If things were different, things would be different. Can’t argue with that.
pretty sure there are other guys who predict political races. besides Silver. Why not compare to them?
and Lance do you now agree I or anyone else can still bet on Trump to win? Maybe Jan 20th they will shut that down .
For the record, I don’t believe that @Lance_Turbo has ever made such a claim. His claim in the other thread was sound and arrived at correctly (took us a while to get on the same page surrounding what exactly his claim was), but as far as I remember, he never once claimed that betting models are more accurate than guys like Nate Silver (who also uses a model) overall. Simply that in the instances he looked at they had outperformed the 538 model.
He also took advantage of the suckers who made this thread possible by taking as much of their money as he could, so I don’t see that he’s questioning the fact that it’s true.
It also seems like they opened new markets after AP called the election.
They opened “Will Trump win any of Pennsylvania, Arizona or Georgia?” on November 10 (if I’m understanding PredictIt’s graphics correctly). Honestly this is a ridiculously sketchy thing to do - it’s basically asking people to bet on the Republicans actually attempting a coup.
They also opened some margin of victory markets on November 13. That I guess has some fig leaf of being an actual bet on an election - it’s possible the initial counts were slightly off. However the only betting is on what the actual result is going to be, and 5k Trump win.
The funny thing is the actual coup scenario would involve the states just giving the “win” to Trump despite not actually changing vote totals, so those markets still wouldn’t both go in Trump’s direction, although the morons betting on Trump winning at this point probably don’t realize that.
You specifically brought Nate Silver up in post #8
I neither agree nor disagree. I don’t think that has been demonstrated in this thread.
Furthermore, even if anyone can bet on Trump right now I don’t believe that that, “Tells you all you need to know about the online betting markets” e.g. it doesn’t tell you that a PredictIt derived forecast outperformed 538’s forecast at every point in the months leading up to the election. That’s worth knowing.
You can bet on Trump. Most of the markets still open are about 10-15c for Trump, 80-85c for Biden depending on the market.
Which ones?
It seems like all those markets are at the 5,000 trader cap.
Well the ones I mentioned upthread have opened after AP called it, and have had trading volume as of yesterday.
There can still be trading volume when the market is capped at 5,000 traders. Those 5,000 people can trade with each other.
I don’t know the site that well and I don’t know how to tell if the market is maxed out or not, or when it happened.
However these are markets that started after AP called it. Everyone on there started betting after the election ended.
I’m not trying to be a dick about this. I have several markets maxed out and am looking for more opportunities.
Also, it’s beside the point. Even if you can bet on Trump, it doesn’t tell you, “all you need to know about the online betting markets”. It doesn’t tell you that PredictIt outperformed 538 as a predictive tool for example.
I’m not sure how to tell that a market is capped other than trying to buy in. Most times when I do this in one of these free money giveaway markets, I find that I can not actually buy in.
I think it at least tells us that irrational gamblers can swing the results even when it they are obviously wrong.
This doesn’t prove that the accuracy they had was just pro-Trump bias coincidentally balancing out pro-Biden polling but it lends more creedence to that theory.
It may well be true that PredictIt was more accurate than 538 for the wrong reasons, but it is definitely true that Predict was more accurate than 538 in forecasting this particular presidential election.
The betting markets know how to make money: They know Trumpers are significantly more out of touch with reality than most people. And casinos love nothing more than a gambler who isn’t grounded in reality.
Even as of now, I know Trumpers who are convinced that the courts will still jump in at the last moment to save the day.
This website is taking bets on Trump. It’s called predictt