online gambling lawyer…

Since 60 hours exceeded 15 minutes by a wide margin, I came up with some new ad copy tag lines for Alexadex to freely use as they see fit.

“Gone Bone fishing on Christmas Island, then exploring the sex lives of cannibals in the equatorial pacific.”

“Gone to frolick with spider monkeys off of St. Barts.”

“Gone to Havana, Cuba, Hemingway style, adrift at sea chasing a big fish.”

“Gone to get smashed and dance in bubbles in Ibiza.”

“Gone shopping in Paris on Rue du Faubourg St. Honore.”

“Gone fishing with Snoop, who started smoking again. What was the name of my web site again?”

“Gone, just f-in’ gone on a Bender.”

“Gone to do Ashtanga yoga Pattabhi Jois style in India.”

However, there’s a critical aspect missing from the future’s market: half of every transaction is an unwilling participant at a fixed price. If I divest myself of all shares of say, yahoo, the price doesn’t fall. Similarly, if I move from an even weighted average of every website ever (is that possible?) to a concentrated holding in a site that just got flash-crowded or something, the price won’t go up because the computer simply accepts all trades. So rather than obtaining information from the price of a share we really only have the number of people invested in a particular site and for how much. In a futures market experiment, we’re really interested in the market as a whole rather than a few very successful players. In fact, because price doesn’t fluxuate, we can’t even predict future values easily.

Because it’s play money that players have no commitment or connection to, anyone who falls below the starting amount can always start a new account. These factors can lead to people pursuing high risk high payout scenarios they wouldn’t otherwise take.And of course, there’s the pump n dump schemes like everyone’s considering here ;). Fortunately there’s no real incentive to win aside from having a link to your website relatively close to the homepage.

But if you’re really interested in futures markets and the web, it might be best to understand a basic one like the Iowa Futures Market. It’s real money but the minimum investment is only 5 dollars. One could imagine that a futures contract based on alexa ratings quite easily, although I doubt they have either the incentive or the man/computer power to do anything exhaustive in the area.

Yahoo! Buzz game seems interesting, but to me at least, these sorts of “predict the next internet meme before it happens!” are only interesting when you don’t already have a reliable measurement tool (such as alexa or slashdot’s “Mysterious Future”). It doesn’t help that people can generally make a ton of ‘profit’ out of the difference between what alexa said happened yesterday and what everyone can see happening today.

Kevin

Waste of time, if you ask me, personally.

Shrikant Joshi

I wish you well on your “investing”.

Note: I’m fucking kidding.

-Jason L. Baptiste