Monday, August 07, 2006

North Korea Contract Update: Department of Defense won't comment, defers to the White House

The controversy concerning the missile test contract remains unresolved in the minds of prediction markets experts (like Chris Masse and Jason Ruspini) as well as many TS customers. Chris Masse has provided a screen shot of a DoD discussion thread (second graphic), where the DoD states:

We will let the White House comments speak for us.

The White House press briefing can be found here, and Stephen Hadley (national security advisor, for the president) says:

It's probably -- it's a short-range ballistic missile. These went out about 275 miles, something like that.

I now must agree with the experts and customers, that expiring the contract at 0.0 is worse than expiring it at 100.0 or unwinding all the trades. The briefing was conducted on the July 4, and the DoD referral on its website is dated July 7.

(Note: I did not trade this contract, nor did I make any recommendations to others)

UPDATE: Corrected Hadley's title from "NSA advisor". Hat tip to my good friend drugtest. Please see his comments on this post.

UPDATE: Welcome, Freakonomics readers. Friends of Tradesports short list, with you-know-who, here. More on the North Korean controversy here and here, covering things over the last month. While I am not a tenth the genius of Levitt + Dubner, I was able to first report on this contoversy a month ago.

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