Losers with too much time and money on their hands?

[ECH1969]

Will an avian-flu epidemic lay waste to millions? Will terrorists strike the New York City subway system before Christmas? Where will the next hurricane make landfall? None of us knows the answers to those questions. But we just might have a better idea than the experts, and our predictions on such matters could prove useful in helping us plan our lives, our portfolios or our escape routes.

The power of markets, it turns out, has something to say about practically everything. We see it at work on Wall Street, which absorbs the collected wisdom of millions of investors and expresses it as stock prices. Prediction markets now let people bet on everything from sports scores to election results to the expected capture of al-Qaeda bigwig Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi.

Some of the best of those online markets: the Hollywood Stock Exchange, the Iowa Electronic Markets, Yahoo's Tech Buzz Game and PublicGyan. InTrade, run by the Trade Exchange Network, an Irish firm, cleared 50,000 contracts last month (including 10% odds that al-Zarqawi will be caught in 2005).

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1118373,00.html