Ferdinand's dashboard

Imho good ideas. I particularly like the power user idea, because it could significantly reduce duplicat markets. Which in turn would create more volume in the fewer existing markets, which would make gambling less attractive.

Another couple of ideas (already brought foreward elsewhere):
- tax the cash with e.g. 1% per day
- a "Tobin tax" of .1 to 1% on all transactions

Please, no automated trading! That would completely ruin HD, as it would overemphasize the gambling part.

@Golwar: disagree: DOW and the like certainly are news. But, yes, *agree*: it would be nice to limit the number of questions on each index. Because, although there are subtle differences in the questions, they are effectively duplicates.

I don't think a bank would be such a good idea. It would make HD too complicated and distract from the original objective of predicting news. Furthermore lending out the money wouldn't work, as there are no securities attached to the loans.

My suggestion would be to rather have a sort of "devaluation" or "tax", i.e. the amount of money held in cash decreases by a certain percentage every day, say 1%. That would reduce the attractiveness of holding cash for long periods of time.

Alternatively or additionally, there could be a "Tobin tax" to the transactions of say .1 to 1% on each transaction. That would slightly slow down rapidly moving in and out of markets.

Last not least, I think the "problem" that betting becomes unattractive for people with huge sums reflect quite accurately a real world problem. A giant player can strongly influence a market which is not very large. So what? If Warren Buffett were to invest all of his money in a single stock, it would move like crazy as well and he probably wouldn't make any profit.
The situation should resolve on its own as more and more people join HD. Another aspect would be to limit the number of markets by some (well thought out) mechanism, this would increase the activity and the volume of the markets.

Hi Tom,
you are of course right that the creator of a question should check before and avoid the creation of a duplicat in the first place. However, this obliously doesn't always happen, so it might be useful to establish a mechanism to resolve the cases where duplicate markets are created and live long enough (say more than a few hours) to create significant "investment".
I am aware that joining markets might not be trivial, since prices in different markets might differ. One out of several options would be to virtually cash in everyone in the market to be dissolved and then buy them in in the new market at the same time.