Thursday 21 January 2010

iPredict's first conditional stocks event derivatives

Matt just launched iPredict's first conditional stocks event derivatives (Happy Chris?).

First, we have a contract, US.BNKE.2FEB, that pays off at $1 if Ben Bernanke is reappointed as Chairman of the Federal Reserve on or before 11:59 PM 2 February. That contract is now at $0.57: a 57% chance that Bernanke is reappointed.

Next, we have two conditional stocks event derivatives on the DOW.

US.NOTBNKE.DOW pays out at 1 cent for each 20 points the Dow closes above 9500 on 2 February if and only if Bernanke is NOT reappointed.

US.BNKE.DOW pays out as above, but only if Bernanke IS reappointed.

The current prices [updated 9:30] are $0.39 for Dow | Confirmation and $0.18 for Dow |~Confirmation. Since p(Confirmation) is 0.57, the prices are reckoning on a Dow at 10,868 if he's confirmed and 10,337 if he's not. The Dow's now at 10,603. So, the market's not figuring on much of a move either way.

Good job Matt on getting these out! I'd love to see some on housing prices conditional on a land tax and unemployment rates conditional on the various minimum wage stocks.

1 comment:

  1. These are really conjunctive (x AND y) claims, not conditional (x IF y) claims. To implement conditional claims, you need to refund the bettors money if y doesn't come true. Wolfers has a good article in which he draws conclusions about conditional probabilities based on conjunctive bets, but making conditional bets available is also useful. Both Hanson [http://hanson.gmu.edu/combobet.pdf] and McCluskey [http://usifex.com/] have designs that make this possible.

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