Please pay attention to the way you pay out markets and close them…

Markets about which team will win a game (like the World Cup Round of 16, Germany vs. Sweden) should pay out at 100 and at 0… do NOT pay them out at the current market price…

Also, unless there’s an Inkling policy about this, I see no reason to close the market (i.e. suspend trading… not liquidation) DURING the game… let the people who want to trade during the game do so.

Either way, don’t LIQUIDATE during the game…

The reason why someone might want to close the market before a game would be to see how effective the market was in choosing the winner. If left to run until the result is known the prices will simply migrate to 0 or 100 naturally.

Have some market makers actually paid out incorrectly? I’ve been very careful in my markets not to mess this up, as there doesn’t seem to be any sort of “undo” mechanism if market makers accidentally enter the wrong data! And it is inexcusable that people are allowed to create markets if they don’t understand the basics of how they work and people get paid. There should probably be some automatic warnings put into the Inkling software to help keep this from happening…

Unfortunately there have been several markets that are paid out incorrectly. Every time, however, an astute trader has noticed and let us know. We DO have an “undo” function that we’ve built that we use ourselves when things are done incorrectly, but we don’t like to have to use it. :)

We’ve just changed a few things in the UI and added some warnings/instructions in the market maker interface so hopefully this will help some but we’re going to be introducing some additional changes soon that should make it even more foolproof.

I see the “point in time” prediction as somewhat arbitrary anyways… Look at the NFL draft… had you shut down a market based on that draft you’d have likely been very, very wrong as almost everyone thought it was going to be Reggie Bush going number 1. To me (and I recognize that this is personal preference) I think the interesting thing is the path the market takes… and from that standpoint it’s pretty neat to watch the market fluctuate during the game just as it fluctuated leading up to the game…

The important thing is to cash the darn things out correctly…

Use a reasonable subject line. ATTENTION was the last entry I read, because it is shouting and didn’t seem to be related to what I was looking for. Yet it did have a lot of good information

inexcusable that people are allowed to create markets if they don’t understand the basics of how they work and people get paid….[/quote]
So I need to learn more about this, as I haven’t seen or been pointed to a good example of running a market. Hopefully learning something new, and making mistakes, is excusable. But maybe I’m more forgiving in this regard.

Also, if ‘Adam’ can fix almost all mistakes, then he will be sure to educate those that don’t learn from their first mistakes. :)