Of course, a form using anonymnity would be preferable. I find it very interesting that the Commodity Futures Trading Comission is allowing this; it increases my opinion of them. If someone would forward this to the extropy list, the idea futures folks on there would find it interesting. -Allen Reuters New Media _ Monday April 1 2:32 PM EST _ U.S. Traders Play Political Futures In Cyberspace CHICAGO - As primaries in the American Midwest confirmed Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole's clean sweep, a Wall Street trader logged into the Internet on his home computer and made one last trade before going to bed. [....] These political futures contracts are not available at the huge, traditional exchanges that trade billions of dollars per day. Instead, the contracts are on the 24-hour Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM), which trades several thousand dollars per day. The IEM, setup in 1988 by the University of Iowa, is a not-for-profit political futures market open to traders globally via the Internet, under the regulatory scope of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. An estimated 5,800 people have registered as IEM members by sending checks or money orders to open trading accounts of $5 up to $500 to trade various world political markets that also include Austria's Vienna City Parliament Election and Canada's British Columbia Provincial Elections. Collectively, accounts total about $150,000, said Joyce Berg, a professor of accounting and director of markets at the University of Iowa. [...] In that race, IEM payoffs are determined by the candidate who wins the majority of popular votes. Contracts in the candidate receiving the largest number of popular votes will pay $1 each while all other contracts will expire worthless. "For those of you with Web access, let me point you to an astounding place for us market geeks -- the Iowa Electronic Market," one trader wrote in the Option Fool newsletter, written and distributed via the Internet. "It's a fun market," said Gary Sparks a stock options trader at Group One Trading who participated in the market during the last presidential election four years ago. But some take the IEM seriously because each candidate's contract price in cents can be translated into his percentage chance of winning. And in the past two U.S. presidential races, the IEM has predicted the winner with an average 0.2-percent absolute margin for error. That compares to the next most accurate Harris poll with a 1.2 percent margin of error, according to the Iowa Political Market's data. That type of accuracy has caught the eyes of at least a few U.S. stock options traders and has earned a weekly spot in a New York Post newspaper roundup of presidential polls. Jeff Yass of Susquehanna Investment Group said he considers what IEM markets are showing when making trading decisions in stocks and options. "Clinton and Dole have been in a tighter race (on the IEM) than any of the Wall Street analysts have predicted," he noted. [...] Copyright 1996 Reuters Ltd.