Drowning in Roadies questions!

You make excellent points here, and I don't disagree with your thinking. As a Canadian, I love the questions that pop up from time to time about Canadian issues, not only because I have knowledge in them, but out of interest. But I also love the rugby and cricket questions, about which I know next to nothing, but which take me intellectually all over the world. So I'm agreed about the international and regional aspects you're talking about.

I see your point about discouragement regarding leaderboard display, but as you say, that will change over time.

However, I don't believe that the day-traders on Dow questions are gaining unfairly. A person who wagers once before the market opens and leaves it at that still wins what they were promised. Day traders make their money from the mistakes of other day traders, and from the fact that the odds jump around fairly dramatically and rapidly. For most of us, it's a way to lose money, or just break even, and winning big one day is no guarantee of not losing over the week. If you look at the Business leaderboard, you see that no-one has more than half of their gainings in that category, and that most of the top twenty have not earned their position with such earnings at all - they're actually good at predicting things.

But what I say about the other in-play markets (ie Asia and Europe exchanges) is based on a fair amount of experience (I have done okay on these), and the observation of some "odd" phenomena. I mean, if only 3-5 people are following the market and its question, then the only competition is who plunks the 10K bet first when it becomes clear what the result is going to be -- there's almost zero risk and a nice payout to be had. I'd say with such low participation there is a good argument to be made for these being handled the way sports questions are (suspend at open, not close). I'd certainly miss the in-play fun, but I do believe fairness comes into it somewhere.

I think, in general, that many of us are more than willing to try our hand at various questions about which we started knowing nothing. Perhaps, as you say, part of the problem is a certain difficulty in finding questions at the moment, which I assume will change. Scottish football - I'm there! Hibs or Hearts? But I'm not sure your example entirely wipes out the concerns I'm expressing in my original post. I mean, how many multiple-choice questions in general end up with less than 4K activity and one choice at 95%? Almost none that I have seen, with the exception of questions that become "obvious" while they're open. And this is not one question I'm pointing at, but a weekly series of many questions. And this is not the only such series.

So I appreciate your concerns about disincentives, but there's got to be some kind of restriction, or we're going to be awash in esoteric questions that most of the community, no matter from where they hail, have no interest in (no matter how much a citizen of the world they wish to be). At the least, the question of accuracy of suspend times should matter.

Admittedly a closer look at the questions revealed 5 on this week's episode alone. Personally I think that's overkill, and I would be inclined to only accept one per week, but I'm not really sufficiently up with settlement issues right now to make that call. I guess the same applies to in-game market trading - if a market is not well-traded we could call a start or middle of day closing time.

Personally I find it all the in-game trading rather perplexing. Although it's clearly not cheating it requires being available to place predictions for much more time than I (and I guess most users) can really afford to be on the site. I guess from a competition point of view it's a bit like expecting enthusiastic amateurs to compete with professionals at the top of their game. I know everybody likes to dream of taking on the top guys, but imagine if Rocky 6 was in the real world - there would have been mashed up old man all over the ring, and that wouldn't have been fun for anybody...

And if you say only one question for Roadies, then does that also apply to possibly more popular questions about American Idol and Lost and Survivor. I see the difficulty at your end. A possible idea: in another thread here I brought up the idea of adding Comments to user pages so that we could communicate with others outside of the question threads. One benefit of this would be we could bug our friends to play our questions (the ones we wrote), and that would perhaps then allow you to add a quorum to markets in terms of participation (how about a minimum of 10 players?). With a quorum, there's less call for anything that might seem like censorship of questions.

In-play is addictive (and like most addictions it's all-encompassing until you realize that you're watching two sets of meaningless numbers go up and down all day long, and finding that really exciting). But I swear it's not the reason people are at the top of the leaderboard (it was perhaps in the early days of February, when a couple thousand up or down made a big difference to the top twenty standings). But all of the top five have impressive scores in one or more non-business categories. If there is an unfair profit to be made with in-play, it's likely to be found in the low-participation markets I talked about, because a few people are picking up 10-20K daily, simply for showing up. The Dow action is more about the gambling bug, and most lucky people don't get out in time to keep their winnings. In both the short and long term, I break even -- it's too volatile to impose a certain system on it, and besides, the cash-out costs restrict the winnings of high-turnover wagering. The only way to make a killing is to at some point buy into the unknown final correct answer, hopefully at ridiculously low odds, and still have that wager at settlement time That's the advantage that day-traders have: they can sometimes buy the "correct" tickets at 1% during the day, while they were 20% before the market opened. But they're only at 1% because everyone else trading at the moment really don't think it's going to be that result.

I thought the day-trading was the reason for wealth too. But a look at the leaders in the various subtopics shows a very different picture. It's kind of reassuring, but at the same time a bit depressing to see how well some people are doing at strict prediction.

Personally, other than the community aspects and the fact of being a news junkie, I find the discovering that markets "work" to be the most interesting thing about Hubdub. I'm still unsure of the predictive ability in general - I'm pushing for measurements of predictive correctness elsewhere - but the truth of the idea that markets are in many cases self-correcting I witness daily. But they do require certain pre-conditions to "work". Liquidity and participation, for sure, and maybe other things.

I believe that questions about television shows that have been pre-recorded should not be allowed. This MTV show is not live, but is similar to Survivor in which these events have occured, and with a little diligence a person can find websites that are "spoiling" these episodes, which is effect gaming the system. Any time we pose a question in which we know the outcome, that is not news forecasting.

I agree with this. I'm not entirely convinced that the plot of tv shows and the progress of reality shows is even Entertainment news. I'd accept award shows and maybe things like Pop Idol and its children shows (because they are very popular and they aren't pre-recorded later in their season, and mostly because the results are actually reported as news). But shows like Survivor aren't really reported as news any longer. Maybe I'm being too harsh here, but definitely Destry's point must be heeded.

Suspicious betting patterns on these roadies questions really should alert us to some gaming. Seems the questions have little action until the 12 hour mark, then huge movements, then nothing. Seems an obvious example of gaming the system just to move up the leaderboard. I am not accusing anyone in particular just seems to be odd movement.