I do suggest, however, that when you own a business and something goes
wrong, you as the CEO immediately take full responsibility, admit the
problem, apologize and fix it fast.
Milton Pedraza
CEO
Luxury Institute, LLC
115 East 57th Street, 11th Floor
New York, NY 10022
Office: 646-792-2669
Cell: 917-657-4988
mped...@luxuryinstitute.com
www.luxuryinstitute.com
Please be advised that your use of a Luxury Institute or Luxury Board
document constitutes your agreement to (i) use the content under a limited
license only for your own internal purposes, and (ii) not disclose, publish
or otherwise make public or provide the content, in whole or in part, to any
third person or entity without the prior written consent of The Luxury
Institute, LLC. The content is and remains at all times the exclusive
intellectual property of The Luxury Institute, LLC. Copyright C 2008, The
Luxury Institute, LLC.
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/intrade.com
The highest volume their site ever sees is a rounding error to
anything like NASDAQ or Google or literally thousands of other sites.
Those that have extremely high bandwidth needs and also the need for
fault-tolerance because real money (or lives) are at stake have
redundant systems that are constantly and automatically monitored and
tested. Given Intrade's modest traffic even at the highest and most
sudden peaks, there really is no excuse for outages or slow
performance to ever be more than momentary.
So, why doesn't Intrade, which is trusted with real-money transactions
and is watched by traders, academics and journalists around the globe,
use industry-standard systems for high peak bandwidth availability and
server capacity? Too expensive?
Being up 99.976% is is 100% meaningless. The question is what
percentage of the instances of heavy peak traffic lead to slow (or no)
site response? There is little harm if the site has issues at most
random times when nothing special is going on or when, for instance,
most traders are sleeping. Heck, you intentionally take your site
offline for an hour every single day to manually count your pennies or
something (that 4% daily downtime apparently doesn't figure in your
uptime estimate, but that's ok).
It's exactly at the peak traffic times that you cannot fail; that's of
course when it matters, and when Intrade seems to regularly have
problems. Even predictable peaks such as election nights and
championship sporting events have regularly led to poor performance.
Intrade has had a real problem with this for as long as I've been
aware of them and they have not yet addressed it adequately.
As to suggesting, again, that an apparently heavy trader and longtime
customer close his account... shame on you. You are surely aware that
the rare person who speaks up like that is speaking for many other
customers who do not bother to say anything because they expect (know)
that their words will fall on deaf ears or fear retaliation. He is
your canary in the coal mine. You should be embracing him and using
him to identify and resolve issues that affect other current,
prospective (and past) customers. The arrogance of saying, in effect,
"we're the only game in town; shut up and be happy with what we give
you or go away," is stunningly short-sighted.
- lucy
On Aug 30, 11:53 am, Milton Pedraza <mpedr...@luxuryinstitute.com>
wrote:
> For all the harsh critics of any growing industry, suggest you go read up on
> Complexity Theory and see how nonlinear and messy life is. And if you have
> not ever had a screw-up, then you have definitely not bet very large in your
> life.
>
> I do suggest, however, that when you own a business and something goes
> wrong, you as the CEO immediately take full responsibility, admit the
> problem, apologize and fix it fast.
>
> Milton Pedraza
> CEO
> Luxury Institute, LLC
> 115 East 57th Street, 11th Floor
> New York, NY 10022
> Office: 646-792-2669
> Cell: 917-657-4988
> mpedr...@luxuryinstitute.comwww.luxuryinstitute.com
That's an exaggeration. There are ways to make educated guesses that some
candidates don't make any sense as VP choices. There are often ways to figure
out that some contracts are trading too high due to long shot bias (especially
when, as has sometimes happened on Intrade, the probabilities add up to
something silly like 130%). I made money betting against Huckabee and Fiorina.
The people who thought they could trade on the last minute rumors were
mostly fools (see an experiment done by Paul Andreassen where subjects
trading stocks did worse if they saw a constant stream of news than if
they saw no news once they started trading).
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter McCluskey | sleepiness is responsible for far more deaths on the
www.bayesianinvestor.com| roads than alcohol or drugs - Paul Martin
It's normal (possibly unavoidable) for financial exchanges to facilitate
irresponsible trading (see the No Trade Theorem).
>traders should be grateful that poor site performance prevented them
>from making stupid trades? Has Emile ever been a successful trader or
I'm a successful trader who's saying a majority of traders ought to
be grateful (but won't be - if they realized they ought to be grateful,
they wouldn't have been trying to trade then). A minority of traders
are sensibly upset.
vega...@gmail.com (vega...@gmail.com) writes:
>By the way, Emile's argument is utterly bizarre. Is he defending
>Intrade by arguing that they are suborning irresponsible trading? That
>