Intrade Wants You to Find and Benefit from Arbitrage Opportunities

It is the season to hunt for risk minimizing profit opportunities on Intrade and on and across other prediction market platforms. We would like to incentivize you to find, highlight and remove these market anomalies.

Periodically arbitrage opportunities exist on Intrade and other prediction market platforms. Arbitrage trading is a risk minimizing strategy that by definition should be “no-gamble”.

To encourage you to profit from these irregularities we will make sure our fees are no obstacle. We are offering all members the ability to execute arbitrage trades entirely on Intrade at zero fees for those trades.

Additionally any member who can find and execute an arbitrage trade between Intrade and any other platform should submit proof after the trades are completed. Once reviewed if our fees have caused the return on your trades to be negative we will refund upto 100% of our fees on such trades. We would encourage other platforms to consider offering the same.

Sometimes people identify arbitrage opportunities but are not in a position to execute the relevant trades. We have created a new thread here (see T&C's) where such arbitrage trades may be logged.

Anyone who does find and highlight to the public such an opportunity and does not execute the relevant trades themselves will earn our thanks, plus a $20 trading credit (and will probably increase the predictive accuracy of the market) if the trades are executed by a trader. Markets that are bid to over 100 or offered at less than 100 for mutually exclusive events do not necessarily qualify for a trading credit.

Fee incentives will be posted to your account after request to help@intrade.com and submission of relevant supporting information.

We hope and expect that people will develop simple price reading and price comparison robots to search for these opportunities. If you are a developer but not a trader and you have such an application or would like to create one, please contact me on john.delaney@intrade.com as we may be able to help you get started with API assistance and support.

Terms and conditions will apply to this offer, but no sneaky ones. Please see our Forum for T&C's.

Traders please take note: All profit and loss risks associated with all trades including trades and traders that attempt to benefit from this offer reside with the trader absolutely and not Intrade. In the event that a trader suffers losses in pursuing an arbitrage strategy for any reason (such as but not limited to a market rule change, one contract in a group being voided or unwound, the platform becoming unavailable, rule changes or differences on Intrade or across platforms, inability to complete the hoped for arbitrage or any other reason whatsoever) Intrade will not entertain, accept or otherwise enter correspondence about any losses as the risk will reside absolutely with the trader.

Free Intrade Historical Market Data - Beta Testers Required/

Happy New Year to All.

We intend to soon offer on a trial basis certain historical market data free of charge as part of an initiative to improve the accessibility, transparency, and validation of prediction markets.

We hope in the near future that by making certain historical market data freely available (and foregoing a revenue stream) we will encourage further academic and business study and support of the prediction market phenomenon.

We will present data by category, event, market group, and individual market. No personal data will be made available. The initial reports that we will provide are closing prices and time and sales of each trade on a market. The data sets will be in a CSV format and will be refreshed daily.

We are looking for a limited number of people to Beta test our application and market data sets. Please contact us on data@intrade.com if you are interested in being a tester and getting access (T&C's will apply) to historical market data.

At What Point Do You Give Up?

In business we all should prospect as if our life depends upon it, because often it does!

Having had many business relationships that seemed so promising and likely to be win-win we all know the feeling of dread when a good business prospect or worse partner won’t return calls.

I remember one time about 2 years ago when I was told by the CEO of a large NYSE listed financial services company that we had an agreement. I remember even better the personal disappointment and that of the team when it didn’t happen*.

It is at these moments we all ask ourselves “At what point do I simply give up?”

Winston Churchill in typical fashion answered this question better than most when he said "Never, never, never give up!"

That is my approach. Just because someone doesn’t “buy” or something doesn’t happen within the expected time does not mean that the opportunity is over. Sometimes you are not talking to the right person or underestimating the time required to achieve something of value.

I got my first job as a graduate after applying to the same investment bank 5 times within a month and not taking “no” for an answer. As an aside, I met my future wife on the first day I finally got a job there. Similarly, one of the best relationships Intrade has achieved is with a large media organization that happened after 2 years and over a dozen different approaches to different gatekeepers.

Thomas Edison when asked about the 700 hundred failures to create a long lasting light bulb is reported to have said “"I have not failed 700 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work."

Emulating an attitude like Edison or Churchill above will help you succeed. It most certainly has for us.

* Little did we know then that "no deal" was the ideal outcome for our future.