GloboTrends columnist Bio:  Brian Butler is a specialist in “global-macro” economic analysis. As a global-macro analyst, Brian founded “GloboTrends“, an online site for macro-economic trend analysis, with a focus on providing this analysis to global investors. The highly popular “GloboTrends blog” is prominently displayed on Thunderbird’s MBA website , and has been featured as syndicated content on Nouriel Roubini’s RGE Monitor, Emerginvest.com, Business Week Exchange, Wikinvest.com, and other reputable news outlets.

Since the purpose of GloboTrends is to comment on global events and to try and guide our readers to see the potential impact of global events, it is tempting for us to discuss the US elections, and try to predict who will win, and what will be the impact on the economy, on global politics, etc.    But, its often difficult to extract the political spin from these discussion, and so…I turned to the predictive markets such as Intrade, where people can bet real money on the outcomes of real events.

The idea behind predictive markets such as Intrade is that people are more willing to say what they really think will happen (rather than what they want to happen) if they actually have money resting on that prediction.  Predictive markets such as Intrade offer a unique way to use online betting to try and predict the future out comes of elections, as well as economic events such as “are we in a recession”.

But, how accurate are these markets in predicting the future?… With only a few days left before the US elections, there is no better time to test this predictive market than the present.  So, lets see how accurate it really is …(anyone care to predict?)

As of October 29th (less than a week before the US elections),  Intrade predicts that Obama will win the election easily, with 364 electoral votes vs. McCains 174.   See interactive chart below.   After the election is over, I’ll come back to this blog post, and will compare the actual results vs. 364/174…and see how close this prediction actually was.   Its not just a matter of who wins, but by how much?  And how accurate was this seemingly very precise predictive tool?….lets see..

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