NewsFutures

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NewsFutures is a prediction game in the form of a stock market, otherwise known as a prediction market. You can buy and sell contracts that will pay $100 (in play money) if a particular event happens in the future, or $0 if it doesn't. While the outcome is uncertain, the trading price is can be considered a proxy for the probability of the outcome. Since its launch in 2000, NewsFutures has operated over 40,000 markets on a wide range of topics in current events, politics, finance and sports.

Like the Foresight Exchange and the Hollywood Stock Exchange, two other U.S.-based prediction markets, NewsFutures complies with U.S. gambling laws by being "free to play": trades are made with play money. This is in contrast to offshore prediction markets like Tradesports, based in Ireland which require users to stock their account with real money.

Contrary to the other prediction markets that focus mainly on U.S. events, NewsFutures has a distinctive international flavor because it also operates markets in French and in Hungarian, enabling U.S.-based players to trade with French and Hungarian counterparts, each in their own language. About half of the site's traffic comes from the U.S., the other half from Europe.

During the 2003-2004 National Football League season, the play money predictions of NewsFutures were systematically compared to the real money predictions of Tradesports and found to be just as accurate (Servan-Schreiber et al., 2004) [1]. This result condradicted conventional wisdom that "putting your money where your mouth is" should enhance prediction market accuracy, and has caused some controversy in the field.

As a company, NewsFutures has also been at the forefront of the application of prediction markets to business forecasting. It is one of several companies that help large corporations set up private prediction markets internally to capture the collective foresight of their employees or client base, as described in James Surowiecki's book The Wisdom of Crowds.