Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Trading Security Futures on Tradesports?

Question for you financial dudes, does anyone trade futures contracts on specific companies' stock prices on Tradesports? I see there are contracts there for the major indices, but what about a specific company? I wonder if betting on a stock price through something like Tradesports might be a simpler way to day trade on a small scale. Just put out a contract for some company's stock to be at some price by the end of the week, but you could bet smaller amounts of money on it than if you were actually buying a real share or derivative. Would this work, or is there a reason why it wouldn't be feasible?

(I suppose one reason could be the new law banning internet gambling. It would be interesting legally if you created a predictive market that focused exclusively on securities that were traded in the standard markets. Would it still be possible to demonize such a market as illegal gambling when there is a perfectly legal and economically necessary market that does exactly the same thing?)