DJIA Poker and "numbers" markets, a new home!

Interesting progression of this website. Seems harder each day to find markets about real news articles and in order to offset that we are allowing questions that have absolutely nothing to do with news.

I think that the "numbers" questions (ie the 4th or tens digit of the dow) are quite different from the dow poker question. The poker-type questions take a business news item data point, and creatively play with it in an entertaining manner. The problem is that the last 3 of 7 digits are essentially arbitrary, and taking these numbers out of order removes any news-value from the question.

The 4th digit of the Dow, OTOH, is a refinement of the regular Dow questions. The movement of this digit over time is coherent. If you sample the DJIA at minute intervals, you see this digit generally remains the same or goes up or down by 1. At precisely the point in the market day where the "hundreds" bracket Dow question (which is essentially equivalent to asking what will the 3rd digit of the dow be) becomes static (one option at 80% plus), this question comes into its own.

Some people have been labelling this question as "fun" or "a lottery". But I disagree with this description. In my view, they are mistaking the abstract nature of the question for a lack of meaning or newsworthiness. This question is abstract in the sense that you can ask it months in advance without knowing the day before's closing. Example: today's close was 13010.00. To pick "2" in the tens digit is to predict the market tomorrow closes at 12820-12829.99 or 12920-12929.99 or 13020-13029.99 or .... The advantage this form has is that if the market goes up 410 points or drops 790 points, there is still a specific slot for it, rather than ending up with 90% bets mid-day on "over 200" or "under 200".

You can play this question as a guessing-game, but you can also predict the market will drop 170 points today, or go up 30-40 in the next hour, which are actual predictions of a newsworthy event.

I just want to make this distinction.

This question ran with no problem for weeks. Then when the dow poker question ran into trouble, this was lumped in with it, and became a problem question, based on faulty reasoning

I agree with infernal machine as to the validity of the dow questions in which they ask what will be a certain digit. That is truly news. It requires some thought and analysis, and also makes for an exciting market as it draws near.
This site has been in beta for more than 3 months, we need a clear definition of what direction the site wants to take. And then we can all work towards helping it get there.
I am to the point where I don't know what questions are going to be allowed or not, so why bother flagging. It feels like a waste of time, unless we had a clear mission statement. So that is what I would like to see. I would like to know what the admins want this site to be in another 90 days and where they see it in a year. What types of questions, how do they feel markets should be decided, we saw the indecision around the last quarter changeover, so lets start looking forward. I know there are no shortages of poeple on this site that would love to come up with creative ideas for making this site better.

I too get frustrated with the lottery or pure poker type of questions. I think it brings an element of sillyness to a site in which news prediction should be the number one priority. In that regard I have been opposed to questions about Hubdub that aren't news. Whether Hubdub players will reach certain levels or how many will, that is not reported by a mainstream news source. It is amazing that back in what we are referring to as the "good ole wild west" days of hubdub, there were more news questions, less lottery and fantasy questions, and more fun.