A new academic paper digging into presidential betting in the final weeks of the 2012 election finds that a single trader lost between $4 million and $7 million placing a flurry of Intrade bets on Mitt Romney—perhaps to make the Republican nominee’s chance of victory appear brighter.

Two economists who studied the data offer various rationales for the trader’s aggressive wagering on Mr. Romney in the final two weeks of the campaign. The anonymous trader placed 1.2 million pro-Romney contracts, some of which were actually in the form of bets against a Barack Obama victory.

The most plausible reason for the betting, the authors conclude, is that “this trader could have been attempting to manipulate beliefs about the odds of victory in an attempt to boost fundraising, campaign morale, and turnout.”
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/0...y-study-finds/

I had wondered why those Intrade betting odds had a much tighter spread than all the reputable polls which showed Obama with a much bigger lead.

Pretty interesting that just one trader was able to manipulate it in that way.

Who knows? If only he (or a few other high stakes traders ) had dumped an extra $20 million into that betting pool, it could have swung the odds in Romney's favor, leading to a rash of media reporting that could have very well swung the election.

Fascinating.