NEWS AND VIEWS
Australia

Other Countries

About the Owl's Election Indicator

Readers of The Economist may be familiar with the political predictions of the Iowa Electronic Markets. That great British magazine regularly publishes the market on the US Presidential election as an alternative to relying on the opinion polls because history shows it is a better indicator. Without going in to all the detail (you can read that for yourself here ) the average error of opinion polls is 1.9% compared to an error of 1.5% for markets.

The Iowa Electronic Markets are operated by faculty at the University of Iowa Tippie College of Business as part of its research and teaching mission. Because of the limited range of events it operates on, Richard Farmer in 2004 began using the markets from the British Betfair website to develop an Election Indicator published on the glug.com.au website for which he also writes.

The Record of the Indicator is shown on this page.

Market Gets Mayor Right

Monday, 5 May 2008 - The opinion polls were equivocal right up to the end but the market certainly predicted that the British Conservatives would end up winning the contest for Lord Mayor of London . On the eve of polling the probabilities were the Conservative's Boris Johnson 85.8%, Labour's Ken Livingstone 13.8% and all the others 0.4%.

In the United States the market based Election Indicator is pointing towards Hillary Clinton winning this week's Indiana Primary with Barack Obama to be successful in North Carolina . I'm taking the short price about Clinton in Indiana and am still happy enough that I've backed her to finally be the Democratic Party candidate for the presidency. more

The Trend of the Australian Indicator

The Australian election indicator has had Labor favourite all this year.