Information Efficiency In Financial And Betting Markets

The degree to which markets incorporate information is one of the most important questions facing economists today. This book provides a fascinating study of the existence and extent of information efficiency in financial markets, with a special focus on betting markets. Betting markets are selected for study because they incorporate features highly appropriate to a study of information efficiency, in particular the fact that each bet has a well-defined end point at which its value becomes certain. Using international examples, this book reviews and analyses the issue of information efficiency in both financial and betting markets. Part I is an extensive survey of the existing literature, while Part II presents a range of readings by leading academics. Insights gained from the book will interest students of financial economics, financial market analysts, mathematicians and statisticians, and all those with a special interest in finance or gambling.

A reprint of one of the classic volumes on racetrack efficiency, this book is the only one in its field that deals with the racetrack betting market in-depth, containing all the important historical papers on racetrack efficiency. As evidenced by the collection of articles, the understanding of racetrack betting is clearly drawn from, and has correspondingly returned something to, all the fields of psychology, economics, finance, statistics, mathematics and management science.

Its basic empirical research and investigation of pure theories of investment in the sports and lottery markets make this volume a winner. These markets are simpler to study than traditional financial markets, and their expected values and outcomes are uncomplicated. By means of new overviews of scholarship on the industry side of racetrack and other betting markets to betting exchanges and market efficiencies, contributors consider a variety of sports in countries around the world. The result is not only superior information about market forecasting, but macro- and micro-analyses that are relevant to other markets. Easily studied sports markets reveal features relevant for more complex traditional financial markets Significant coverage of sports from racing to jai alai New studies of betting exchanges and Internet wagering markets

This unique book delves into a number of intriguing issues and addresses several pertinent questions including, should gambling markets be privatized? Is the ‘hot hand’ hypothesis real or a myth? Are the ‘many’ smarter than the ‘few’ in estimating betting odds? How are prices set in fixed odds betting markets? The book also explores the informational efficiency of betting markets and the prevalence of corruption and illegal betting in sports.

Volume 1 of "The Strategic Analysis of Financial Markets," — Framework, is premised on the belief that markets can be understood only by dropping the assumptions of rationality and efficient markets in their extreme forms, and showing that markets still have an inherent order and inherent logic. But that order results primarily from the "predictable irrationality" of investors, as well as from people's uncoordinated attempts to profit. The market patterns that result do not rely on rationality or efficiency. A framework is developed for understanding financial markets using a combination of psychology, statistics, game and gambling analysis, market history and the author's experience. It expresses analytically how professional investors and traders think about markets — as games in which other participants employ inferior, partially predictable strategies. Those strategies' interactions can be toxic and lead to booms, bubbles, busts and crashes, or can be less dramatic, leading to various patterns that are mistakenly called "market inefficiencies" and "stylized facts." A logical case is constructed, starting from two foundations, the psychology of human decision making and the "Fundamental Laws of Gambling." Applying the Fundamental Laws to trading leads to the idea of "gambling rationality" (grationality), replacing the efficient market's concept of "rationality." By classifying things that are likely to have semi-predictable price impacts (price "distorters"), one can identify, explore through data analysis, and create winning trading ideas and systems. A structured way of doing all this is proposed: the six-step "Strategic Analysis of Market Method." Examples are given in this and Volume 2. Volume 2 of "The Strategic Analysis of Financial Markets" — Trading System Analytics, continues the development of Volume 1 by introducing tools and techniques for developing trading systems and by illustrating them using real markets. The difference between these two Volumes and the rest of the literature is its rigor. It describes trading as a form of gambling that when properly executed, is quite logical, and is well known to professional gamblers and analytical traders. But even those elites might be surprised at the extent to which quantitative methods have been justified and applied, including a life cycle theory of trading systems. Apart from a few sections that develop background material, Volume 2 creates from scratch a trading system for Eurodollar futures using principles of the Strategic Analysis of Markets Method (SAMM), a principled, step-by-step approach to developing profitable trading systems. It has an entire Chapter on mechanical methods for testing and improvement of trading systems, which transcends the rather unstructured and unsatisfactory "backtesting" literature. It presents a breakout trend following system developed using factor models. It also presents a specific pairs trading system, and discusses its life cycle from an early, highly profitable period to its eventual demise. Recent developments in momentum trading and suggestions on improvements are also discussed.

How does one effectively aggregate disparate pieces of information that are spread among many different individuals? In other words, how does one best access the ‘wisdom of the crowd’? Prediction markets, which are essentially speculative markets created for the purpose of aggregating information and making predictions, offer the answer to this question. The effective use of these markets has the potential not only to help forecast future events on a national and international level, but also to assist companies, for example, in providing improved estimates of the potential market size for a new product idea or the launch date of new products and services. The markets have already been used to forecast uncertain outcomes ranging from influenza to the spread of infectious diseases, to the demand for hospital services, to the box office success of movies, climate change, vote shares and election outcomes, to the probability of meeting project deadlines. The insights gained also have many potentially valuable applications for public policy more generally. These markets offer substantial promise as a tool of information aggregation as well as forecasting, whether alone or as a supplement to other mechanisms like opinion surveys, group deliberations, panels of experts and focus groups. Moreover, they can be applied at a macroeconomic and microeconomic level to yield information that is valuable for government and commercial policy-makers and which can be used for a number of social purposes. This volume of original readings, contributed by many of the leading experts in the field, marks a significant addition to the base of knowledge about this fascinating subject area. The book should be of interest to anyone looking at monetary economics, economic forecasting and microeconomics.