Here's why you should care, even though Intrade is now defunct: We media types watch prediction markets closely because they

Intrade goes to great lengths to transparently define the contracts in their markets for hosts of potential pitfalls: candidate deaths, calling outcomes, etc. The investors in this market are fully aware of what they are trading and the risks associate with that.

While an expert may know more than anyone else in the room, he is unlikely to know more than the room as a whole, to be wiser or cleverer than the crowd.

Mr. Obama was a big winner on election night. But there were others. Statistical modelling was one such winner, and the other big winners were the prediction markets, which had it right all along.

Obama's reelection odds on those prediction markets went from 62.5 to 64 percent over the course of the debate. According

PredictWise, a service that aggregates those markets, which themselves aggregate the "wisdom of the crowds," kept a minute

That's better than nothing, although critics of such markets -- which essentially put a percentage on conventional wisdom

Wall Streeters may not want President Obama to get reelected, but that is not going to stop them from trying to make money

But the individual mandate was of course upheld, meaning a lot of people making bets against it lost some money today. The

A professional horseplayer once told me that compared to handicapping horse races, elections were a cakewalk. "Polls can be inaccurate," he said. "Gamblers are accurate or they lose." There's considerable evidence he was on the money.

Casinos for betting on what something will do in the future have been elevated to the status of "prediction" markets, and they can cover a broad range of issues

Yesterday, I also interviewed to Temple University Professor Christopher Wlezien, who long-time Pollster readers may remember