Tradesports and Intrade Separation
Tradesports has separated their non-sports contracts to their sister platform Intrade. Intrade is one of their three platforms, the one that in the past has always focused on the “prediction market” angle of political, weather, and entertainment contracts. You have never been able to trade the sports contracts from this platfrom. But you always used to be able to trade all the contracts, including all the non-sports contracts, from the Tradesports and TradeBetX platforms.
This is no longer possible unfortunately. They even moved the daily DOW closing contracts over to Intrade!
If you have an existing Tradesports account and find you suddenly cannot access the election contracts or play the American Idol contestants (like I like to do), all you have to to is email:
…and ask them for your new Intrade account login details. They will be different now. You also now have to fund the account separately. If you email them again asking to make a 1-time transfer from your Tradesports balance they will do this for you, but it cannot be reversed.
Another casualty in this transformation is the old Tradesports forum. For some reason they disabled it and started up a new one at Intrade. You will need to get your Intrade logging details to even access it. Bit of a pain in the ass, but you’ll find all the old gang their making new posts.
Nobody is really sure why they did this, but my guess is they are trying to create a respectable image for “Prediction Markets” (after all it gets some coverage in The Wall Street Journal and CNBC, especially during election years). Sports bettors are seen as rabble in society and only cheapens this image.
If you need be I’ll be cruising the slums looking for value.
Technorati Tags: Tradesports, Intrade, Prediction markets
February 16th, 2008 at 8:10 pm
Ted Williams…
This is great…