Hot off the presses today is a brand new prediction market for trading shares of various predictions of the future — Inkling. There aren’t many active markets yet, but the site appears to be getting alot of traffic. The latest markets include the most popular programming language, the next Big 10 men’s basketball coach to leave, Project Runway season two results, and Apple rumors. From what I’ve seen so far, the site seems fairly well implemented. Of particular note is the trading wizard they use to facilitate trading for users who are less market-savvy. The wizard very explicitly interprets current share price as a probability, and uses a simple set of choices to suggest an optimal trade. When I looked at shares of Daniel Vosovic winning Project Runway Season 2, they were selling at $31.70. The wizard first asked me if I thought Daniel had exactly a 32% chance of winning (his current share price rounded up), or a higher chance, or a lower chance. After I specified that I thought he had a higher chance of winning than that, it asked me how low I thought 32% was “just below”, “low”, or “way too low”, with corresponding recommended trade sizes of 5, 20, or 50 shares. This is a well thought out way to elicit well-calibrated trades from inexperienced users.
In the spirit of full disclosure, here are my current holdings

• Nick Lachey vs. Jessica Simpson
• Nick will get money in the divorce settlement, bought @ $86.80
• Project Runway Season 2
• Daniel Vosovic, bought @ $31.70
• Del.icio.us vs. Digg vs. Reddit vs. Slashdot
• Reddit, sold @ $74.50

It looks like the markets are active and volatile right now - I’m up $580 in just the last few minutes. Join in!