One third of the INTRADE bets placed on a Romney win in the last few weeks were by one person.

[kpete]

I saw an interesting article on Slate today: "Why a Single Trader Was Willing to Lose Millions Betting on a Romney Win" It seems that one third of the bets placed on a Romney win in the last few weeks were by one person. The article relies on this paper, titled Trading Strategies and Market Microstructure: Evidence from a Prediction Market.

The paper from Columbia University's Rajiv Sethi and Microsoft Research's David Rothschild found that the single anonymous trader accounted for about one-third of all bets made on Romney during the final two weeks of the campaign. So, regardless of motivation, it's clear the trader played an out-sized role in determining an Intrade line that was all too often used by pundits and political journalists to suggest the presidential race remained a toss-up until the very end.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/09/24/_2012_intrade_paper_suggests_a_single_intrade_trader_spent_millions_to_make.html
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/09/24/1241082/-Rigging-The-Intrade-Market-For-Romney-Last-Year

[DJ13]

1. Now we know why Rove was so pissed off on Fox Noise that night

[HERVEPA]

2. Bless him. He helped me make a lot of money on the election.

With the odds, it was nuts not to put a pile of money on Obama on Intrade if you could afford to.
Oh, thanks to Nate also of course.

[tanyev]

3. .

[Happyhippychick]

4. Ha ha. Tool.

[alittlelark]

5. Bet it was Romney....

[BainsBane]

6. might have been one of those awful business owners threatening their employees

if Obama won.

[winter is coming]

9. Nah, I'm thinking it was the Koch brothers. n/t

[LiberalAndProud]

7. I speculated that it might have been Rove

in an earlier thread.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023723055

I wonder if s/he believed, in a faithful, religious way of believing, that Romney would win in the end. It doesn't make sense to gamble so much simply to manipulate the numbers. It produces a cosmetic difference, but Romney's campaign could have employed that 4 million in different ways if the intent was to affect the outcome of the race.

I also wonder if the trader's name was Rove.

[winter is coming]

8. LOL, I wondered about that. n/t