Mercado de futuros = informação (2)

A recente polémica sobre a criação, pela betandwin, de uma aposta sobre o vencedor das eleições presidenciais revelou a ignorância dos candidatos Manuel Alegre, Jerónimo de Sousa e Mário Soares bem como dos órgãos de comunicação social no que respeita a mercados de futuros.

Como referi em post anterior, uma aposta é um contrato de futuros que expressa, sob a forma de preço, as expectativas dos investidores/apostadores. Por outras palavras, é uma importante fonte de informação que, de outro modo, permaneceria desconhecida.

Os mercados de futuros estão em crescimento e podem incluir qualquer evento (desportivo, político, empresarial, económico, etc). Da revista Time:

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.

(...)

The driving force behind prediction markets is something called information aggregation. Traditionally, it has been the realm of professionals such as pollsters or weather forecasters or the CIA. Those experts tend to be knowledgeable but are prone to certain limitations: personal bias, groupthink, clashing personalities.

(...)

Markets are hard to beat and even harder to manipulate. On Dec. 11, 2003, InTrade's contract on Saddam Hussein's capture suddenly began to move. "We noticed that that contract started trading from 9 to 30 for no reason," says Mike Knesevitch, communications director. "Something was happening." In fact, someone may well have been trading on inside information. Two days later, Saddam was in custody.

(...)

For individuals, markets are beginning to offer potentially useful opportunities to hedge risk in their lives. Do you think the real estate market is going to crash and take your house with it? HedgeStreet.com lets you take a position on the median home price in a number of large cities by matching your bet in a "hedgelet" against someone with the opposite opinion. Similarly, you can hedge the price of gasoline, mortgage rates or inflation rates. [Justin] Wolfers [a markets expert at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School] believes that individuals will ultimately be able to use markets to hedge everything, even their own employability.

Nota: os únicos candidatos presidenciais que, por enquanto, não se mostraram "preocupados" com a referida aposta foram os economistas Francisco Louçã e Cavaco Silva.