Jan 2017 fed futeres now starting to price in the chance of no action by the Fed. Glad to be out, market pricing seems to be fixed at 'whatever the Fed says minus 1 hike'
If polls were better than market prices at some point people would figure that out and reprice markets. Betfair is more than just a bookie, its a true market with bids and offers and low transaction costs. The screenshots I posted are very similar to a stock Level 2 window
No, because the "status quo" bias is variable, so the spread between the polls and the bookies doesn't have to be constant. For instance, things worked very differently in the Scottish referendum and the 2015 General Election. There are many other issues. For example, all votes are equally weighted, while bets are not.
A non-expert (which is like 99% of observants) is more likely to be right by relying in markets than his/her own assement of the status quo bias or any other variable they might think makes it 'different this time' or anything like that
I would tend to agree with you in this, but I think it's wise to be aware of all the shortcomings of the mkt's way of assessing the odds.
How have your returns continued in the years since the first post? Did you manage to catch the large trends over the last couple of years?
From the macro/investing side the returns went down because I spent many years just buying short-term USTs and doing little or no macro trading (up until Q3 last year). The overall returns went up because of the day and swing trading of US equities that I do
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-06-20/did-£25000-bet-remain-send-trillions-assets-soaring I wondered about this in the past. If someone wanted to manipulate the US election by some degree, he could put millions to work pushing the odds on bookies a week or two before the election and that would probably work (to move the odds). That would still be a drop in the bucket compared to how much money people spend financing campaigns or lobbying
This all sounds wonderfully easy and plausible in hindsight, which, I suppose, is what ZH is good at... In reality, such a strategy offers exceedingly low risk reward, unless one gets lucky.
I dont know man, I'm rarely on the conspiracy camp but having saw how markets can be manipulated to achieve goals (BATS IPO a few years back plus pump and dumps I trade regularly) it just looks like an opportunity for the sharks. With a few million someone could create headlines all over the US about a Trump 'surge'. They are very illiquid markets but they get a lot of attention