A road too far!  • DISCUSSION
III-Vs Review, Volume 16, Issue 7, October 2003, Page 9 
(monthly)

A road too far!

The US Navy compound semiconductors web site which allows experts to come in 
and bet’ on when technical targets will be reached, or when time lines for 
development must be extended, is ingenious. Transposing this into a new way 
to predict events and searching for the ‘broadest possible set of new ways 
to prevent terrorist attacks,’ allowing anonymous speculators to bet on 
forecast terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups in an online futures 
market’ seems to take the idea slightly too far. The opportunity to bet on 
such events was at: www.policyanalysis. org. It is not now available.Traders 
who registered would have deposited money into an account, similar to a 
stock account and won or lost based on predicting events. Called the Policy 
Analysis Market, it intended to register up to 1,000 traders in July, and 
begin trading in October. The trader numbers were initially limited to 1,000 
possibly expanding to 10,000 by January 2004. 

Market focus was to have been on the economic, civil and military futures of 
Egypt, Jordan, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey and as 
well as the consequences of US involvement with those nations. 

In defending the programme, the Pentagon pointed out that such futures 
trading has proved effective in predicting events like oil prices, elections 
and movie ticket sales. Research indicates that markets are extremely 
efficient, effective and timely aggregators of dispersed and even hidden 
information,” said the Defense Department. Futures markets have proven 
themselves to be good at predicting such things as elections results; they 
are often better than expert opinions.”