Topic: Feature Requests / Sortable dashboard

Thanks for the post David. Soon, very soon… Definitely at the top of the list of things to do.

Topic: For Marketplace Administrators / How do I get report data?

The .csv reports are slightly in flux at the moment as we make them a lot easier to get to. Pretty soon we’ll have a page with the reports available.

Can you send us an email (admin at inklingmarkets dot com) with the market you are trying to get a report for please, and we can send it along.

Topic: Feature Requests / Standing Position Stop-Exit & Open-Risk

Yes, it would be a great feature and thanks for the input you guys. It’s on a list of things to consider getting done soon.

Topic: For Traders / Concurrency

Unfortunately we aren’t able to lock you into the prices you see on the confirm page at this time. It’s kind of like the real stock market this way. If you see a price and submit your order, and by the time your order gets to the guys taking care of these orders the prices might have changed and you get what you get. Now in the real stock market you also have a concept of “limit orders” to help avoid this becoming a problem but we don’t have limit orders. One reason we don’t have them is the extra level of complexity added in helping people understand how to use Inkling.

To be honest you are the first one that has asked about it. Are you asking because you placed in order for a great deal more or less than what you were trying to get?

If we saw this becoming a problem, we do have some ideas on how to alleviate the situation. So I’d love to hear your feedback.

Topic: For Traders / Market not cashed out when it should be

Keith: nope, we took care of it, you’re good

Topic: Feature Requests / Performance Graph

Ahh, yeah, that makes sense. Thanks for the recommendation.

Topic: For Marketplace Administrators / Graph doesn't display both markets

Nope, this type of market only shows the one stuck in the graph. Will get a fix out soon. Thanks for pointing this out.

Topic: Feature Requests / "Most recently traded" in the markets list

Right, agreed. It’s on the task list.

Topic: For Traders / Market not cashed out when it should be

I’l keep an eye on the Dancing with the Stars market, but if you don’t mind, post the results to this thread when you hear them please.

Topic: For Traders / Numerical markets

1. Correct, assuming you are talking about how much you earn when the market is finally cashed out at $53 a share.

2. There is no upper limit. You are in trouble. :) Your account is going to go into negative territory if you can’t afford to buy back the stocks at a high price. You are going to have to beg for more inkles.

3. That’s right. A dollar equals another day. And they function like the other numerical markets otherwise.

Topic: Feature Requests / Sell shares

Yep. It’s like you are reading our minds. :) This is already in the queue.

Topic: Feature Requests / Timezones

Good point. We’ll consider it some more.

Topic: Feature Requests / copy market

Yep, you got it, it’s already in the queue.

Topic: Feature Requests / Most active stocks

Yeah, I totally agree. We’ll get something different in there soon.

Topic: For Marketplace Administrators / The single outcome delemma

ednique: It looks like the real goal of your market is not to dwell in the world of probabilities but you might just want to compare how many points your teams are going to score. You could just create a market by choosing “The answer to your question will be a number.” and then “Determine a specific number (e.g. xx.yy)” and ask “How many points will these teams score in the competition.” This way you can create stocks for each of your teams, and have traders pick actual point scores of each team. If you only have a max of 8 points in the game you are describing, make sure you pick a scale of .1 so you traders have a bit more room to play. So a price of $80 will equal 8 points.

Topic: For Marketplace Administrators / The single outcome delemma

onemike: Inkling is meant to help you predict something you can measure later on. Will something happen? How many of X will happen? Etc. This thing that you measure at the end you want to be independent of how the prediction market works.

If you are just asking, “which project should we pick”, this is a much better question for a traditional poll or take a vote.

This isn’t the fault of our market maker or using some other mechansim. It’s just not a good fit for what a prediction market is meant for. A prediction market is meant to predict something. If you ask your market to just trade and we’ll pick the highest priced stock as a project and then pay off that highest priced stock just because it’s the highest priced stock, people are now just trying to predict what other people are going to pick as the highest priced stock. There’s no actual feedback loop on anything important.

If the project ends up losing you a million dollars, how do you “punish” your traders for choosing a project with a negative ROI? You’ve already rewarded them for just picking the stock they thought everyone else was going to pick, not on some criteria that is completely independent from the market.

ednique: I’m still having a tough time understanding what your getting at. I don’t really know what (points * 100) / maxpoints is an equation for. Probability is the measure of how likely an event is. All the probabilities of all the possible outcomes of an event have to add up to 1.

Let’s pretend the 6 teams in your example, were complete identical (like the side s of a coin) you would say they all have an equal chance of winning. What is the probability of T1 winning: 1/6. That’s about 17%. How about T2. It’s the same 1/6 17%. Add them all up and it equals 1 or 100%. That’s all you can work with.

Also, if we state that team-a (the winner) was predicted with “there’s a 96% change that they will win.” and we look at the runner up which states “there’s a 6% chance that they will be the winner.” doesn’t that look wrong?

If the market actually thinks that this team has a 96% of winning the rest of the field has a 4% of winning since 96+4 = 100. There’s nothing wrong with how this looks. The crowd feels that team 1 is awesome, and almost a sure thing of winning this thing. The rest of the field doesn’t have much of a chance. Well they have a 4% chance.

If I look at the outcome of a question like “Who will win this years competition?” you will have indeed one winner with a probability of 90 or above when the cashing out is about to happen…

Inkling isn’t always spitting out these sure thing predictions because life isn’t filled with these sure things. Look at:

http://home.inklingmarkets.com/market/show/6569

The Sopranos definitely had a better chance of winning than any other show in their category. But the rest of the field as a whole had a chance of winning of over 50%.

Topic: For Marketplace Administrators / The single outcome delemma

Thanks for the question. But I’m probably misunderstanding your point.

To me it seems that the runner up actually had a 85% chance of winning the competition and the winner actually 96% chance.

The probability of all outcomes of something all have to add up to 1 (100%). So if the contest you describe only has one winner how can 2 people have a (.85 + .96 = 1.81) 181% probability of winning?

Topic: Feature Requests / Most active stocks

thanks you’re right, there’s a bug. right now we show “trades” as an activity indicator in that market list, but the active market sort order is by traders. thats why the sorts doesn’t look quite right. i’ll stick it in the queue to get fixed.

Topic: For Marketplace Administrators / Initial weightings in single event markets?

I hear you guys on setting the prices again in this market type. It used to be there and we took it away because it was getting too complicated when we added the ability to add a new stock to a running market and the prices magically adjust downward. We also thought it would take out one more thing that people had to worry about. But I think we’ll be adding it back real soon. Sorry about the inconvenience. We had only the best intentions :)

Topic: Feature Requests / Market makers choose the "granularity"?

My smoothness remark was directed at Jeds comment about the lack of smoothness he sees sometimes: some markets resemble a sine wave. It’s tough to see what the price means, since half the time it’s hi and half the time its low since about half the traders sit on one extreme and the half on the other. And that’s where I think the moving average would be a solution.

Lax, your seeing a different problem that is causing too much smoothness :)

As for the oil futures, the granularity these days of all futures markets has recently been tuned to the same as the options market (~10c), so an oil market should get more action. Let me know how scaling works for you too. We are doing it for some clients and seems to be intuitive so far…

Topic: Feature Requests / Market makers choose the "granularity"?

In lieu of allowing people to change the price velocity, would adding a “scale” to the formulation of your market do the job?

Here’s an example:

If you are determing something like the number of Amazon stars a new product will have, you could say that: $1 = 0.1 Stars. So that when the price is $20 people have a consensus that the product will only have 2 stars in Amazon’s feedback system.

Or if the thing you are predicting can have numbers in the 1000’s, $1=100 widgets, could be an appropriate scale.

Just mention in your market description what that scale is.

We did recently and somewhat silently add a “scale” field to markets to help with this. When creating a future, a box will pop up on the bottom of the market maker to add a scale. This scale doesn’t really do much except for update the “[stock.price]” in your market answers with the price unscaled. But in the future, I imagine we’ll use this field to add scale information automatically near/inside your market description, so you don’t have to.

Jed, I also think about the volatility thing a lot too. As a market maker though, would just seeing a graph of a moving average accomplish just as much as actually trying to dampen the trading dynamically. Are the traders acting anymore unwisely if the average smooths out the information after the fact?