Uh oh, another Intrade contract kerfuffle

But this is not Intrade's doing. Jessie Livermore reports:

The swine flu contracts were originally going to be expired based on the number of confirmed cases, as published by the CDC at http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/update.htm. Now the CDC has stopped publishing the number of "Confirmed" cases and is only publishing the "Confirmed + Probable" case numbers.

It's not obvious to me how Intrade should handle this type of situation. I think they did a good job when they designed the contract. They chose a metric which was quantitative, authoritative, and freely available on the internet. Of course, to properly evaluate these contracts, traders had to recognize that the number of lab-confirmed cases would be only a small fraction of the actual number of cases. But after making this adjustment, the contracts offer quite a good vehicle for predicting whether the flu will peter out or continue to spread.

DISCLOSURE: I am long and short various contracts.