Intrade: 2012 elections. Anyone following?

[AJ Dual]

Does anyone else, besides Micro and I, follow Intrade, the prediction market?

You make a "prediction", or you buy shares of someone else's prediction, and the price, in cents of USD is the percentage of probability the market assigns to the event. 0% is $.00, 50% is $5.00 and 100% (it happened) is $10.00... When the event happens, wrong predictions close at $0, and right ones at $10. In the meantime, they "trade" with a buy/ask price that sets what the market thinks the probability is.

Right now, Obama is trading at around $6.51, or 65% chance of winning the election. Romney is trading at $3.50 or 35% chance.  Looking at it as more like a 50/50 bet, but Romney only trading at around $3.38, I bought in, figuring I'd get a 3-1 return if he wins, and the Romney prediction shares were at a minimum certainly undervalued and ought to be around $5.00 figuring on the roughly 50/50 split in the polling numbers.

Romney went up sharply, peaking out at a bit over $4.00-40% after the first debate and the Ryan/Biden debate now he's falling back again even while his numbers in the U.S. polls are still trending upward.

I guess I could see a bunch of European buyers/gamblers not understanding the bias of the MSM that's spent all summer trying to make Obama's win seem inevitable, or the flawed 5-10-15% Democrat oversample, or what likely voters vs. registered voters with the bent "self-fulfilling prophecy" polling they've tried to do up until October, when their credibility mattered more, and they switched to 50/50 DEM/GOP weights, and "Most Likely Voter"...

And now, while the polling is showing Romney in the lead slightly, and the trending in the electoral map moving his way, Intrade has him falling back, and Romney has never rose to at least the $5.00-50% value I think he should have at minimum there.

A quick count of the un-matched shares for the Obama/Romney election today is about 11,000, figuring bought shares, vs, volume moving this week at around 80,000 shares, I'd figure there's about maybe 240,000- 500,000 shares of Romney, and a similar number for Obama...

So here's the long and short of it, Intrade, being the one "poll" you can BUY, I'm wondering if some Obama supporters haven't spent roughly 3 million USD or so to corner Intrade and keep Obama above 50% no matter what the polls are saying.  Sounds like a lot, not to mention the work of all the shill accounts, and keeping things pseudo-random to avoid Intrade from seeing any glaring irregularities... but OTOH, it's a pittance for the first campaign expected to reach, or at least come close to a billion dollars in total expenditures.

And it's good for me, since it's keeping my cost-basis lower. When I decided to fund an Intrade account, Romney was trading at only $2.50, but U.S. and Irish money laundering and online gambling laws meant it took 10 days + to fund my account, and he was at $3.30 when I finally could buy. However that means if Romney wins, I only stand to roughly triple my money, rather than quadruple it.