Paris Werewolves

The Excel chart image from the previous post on political forecasting left the webpage ugly. Let's pretty it up again with a vintage Aston Martin, done up mildly for bridal photos.

Note: red sparkline bars indicate aggregate losses on IEM vote share contracts by month. Blue sparkline bars indicate aggregate gains.  Since my last post  about the discreet charms of gambling on election outcomes, I was kindly directed by IEM to its historical vote share contract prices for the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. The table above shows that with these additional data, traders had still tended to overvalue Democratic candidates from August through October, while undervaluing Republican candidates. The extreme overvaluations of Hilary Clinton in 2016 still exert an influence, but it is much less pronounced. Excluding 2016 prices, Democratic candidates would still be overvalued in each month, but never by as much as 2%. Republican candidates would not be undervalued at all, except in August by about 3%.  Hence from a gambling perspective, the IEM market appears reasonably accurate to the extent that there are not many information gaps left to exploit. Let...

It was just a matter of time before the vortex of politics sucked me in. Since arriving in France, we've been through: An intense period of social security "reform" that resulted in weeks of protests and a long, stinky garbage strike The resignation of a sitting prime minister A European Union election that led to ... The dissolution of the French parliament followed by ... A snap parliamentary election that produced no governing majority, culminating in ... The appointment of a new prime minister from the coalition that won the fewest seats in the snap election There was also a little sideshow vote on whether electric scooter services like Lime would be allowed to operate any longer on the streets (and by extension, the sidewalks) of Paris. A whopping 13% of voters turned out, 90% of whom voted to get rid of them. And it happened: one day, all the rental  trotinettes were gone. But what recently focused my mind on politics was the receipt of my overseas absentee ballot....