Bullish!
Emile Servan-Schreiber
NewsFutures, Inc
NewsFutures, Inc
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Founded in 2000
Auto financed; Profitable
Nine employees
Two public exchanges (40,000+ markets)
Corporate clients in US, Europe and Asia
Business Models
Prediction Trader Panels
Corporate Markets
Technology Licensing
Public Markets
Launch: Fall 2000
36,000 registered traders
Launch: Fall 2004
10,000 registered traders
Customers in Various Industries
Pharmaceuticals
Insurance
Advertising
Consumer Appliances
Automobile
Food
Publishing
Cable
Ten Fortune 1000 clients
Revenue Streams
Revenue
100%
Technology Licensing
Corporate Markets
Public Markets
0%
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
Popular Corporate Applications
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Sales forecasting
Price forecasting
Project / Product prioritization
Product / Feature selection
Regulatory monitoring
Prediction & Decision markets
What we are learning
along the way
It’s not only about accuracy
It’s not only about:
It’s also (mostly?) about:
Accuracy
Community - Dialogue
Liquidity
Being heard - Listening
Money
Focus – Getting on board
Incentives
Knowledge – Business Value
Software
User-friendly design
Trading
(Job security)
It’s not only about accuracy
It’s not only about:
It’s also (mostly?) about:
Accuracy
Community - Dialogue
Liquidity
Being heard - Listening
Money
Focus – Getting on board
incentives
Knowledge – Business Value
Software
User-friendly design
Trading
(Job security)
Experimental Economics
Psychology
Markets as Brains
Intelligence
Accuracy
In both cases
•Intelligence emerges from interaction of many relatively dumb parts
•Learning by reinforcement & pruning improves performance
What can we do together?
• Commercial / Non-commercial software licenses
• Scientific collaborations
• Experiments
• Public or corporate data analysis
• New, business-relevant research questions
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Trader psychological profiles (real money / play money)
Incentives (short term – long term)
Trader Motivations
Trading styles
Longitudial studies – market as learning system
Contact us!
0-100 Markets
Multiple-Outcome Markets
with automatic arbitrage
(Patent Pending)
Pharmaceutical Industry
Trends 2003
Markets sponsored by eLilly
Operational Details
• Participants were several hundred people
recruited form the general population of
NewsFutures.com traders.
• Markets operated with virtual money, but
with a $10,000 cash prize to split among
the 10 most successful traders.
Will a law be passed allowing
drug re-importation?
President Bush
says that he
wants a bill
on his desk
by Jul 4th.
Result = No
Will a new drug benefit be introduced
under Medicare?
President Bush
says that he
wants a bill
on his desk
by Jul 4th.
Result = Yes
Late night
“arm twisting”
as the House of
Representative
votes on the
Medicare bill…
By how
much
will
physicians
By how
much
willaccess
access to to
physicians
increase
or decrease
(2002
vs 2003)?
increase
or decrease (2002
vs 2003)?
Result = +7.4%
(sales force headcount increase for top-10 pharma companies)
How many New Molecular Entities
will be approved by the FDA in 2003?
Result = 21