Firday was a good day to mkae some money on the predictions market at iPredict. The Morgan poll was release that indicated that Labour had closed the gap to 3% on National, and this if you were to believe the poll was a significant difference from the 10-18% difference from previous polls.

The prediction market had previously had National on about a 75% chance of winning and Labour on 23%. As was to be expected after the poll was released National shares began to decrease in value and Labour increased. Then at one stage some one bought a huge number of Labour shares forcing the price of the Labour shares up to 38c, while the National shares remained at 74c. This caused an interesting situation in the market where the shares were overvalued, a prime time to make money. To explain this more clearly the the PM stocks there are 3 options: PM.NATIONAL, PM.LABOUR, and PM.OTHER, at the end of the election one of these shares will pay out $1 and the others $0. Purchasing of shares can be done individually at the market price, or bought from the market owner as a bundle getting 1 share of each type for $1. With the market price of National and Labour being 74c and 38c respectively the market was over valued at $1.13. Making money is simply done then by buying bundles from the market owner, and selling them at the market price and makeing a 13c proffit on each pair of shares.

I often find the Polls done by the like of news papers and tv stations somewhat amusing. They make big claims about their polls being accurate to 0.5% or somthing similar based on the sample size of the poll compared to the population. Of course these polls are only as acurate as the sample being a true normal representation of the population, and this can be affected by several types of bias.

The splints were back with a vengance after my run last night. Having completed a 4km circuit on Saturday, Monday, and Thursday it was very annoying. I iced my shins after the run as reccomended on some website that I had read and this helped reduce the pain quite nicely. I believe the splints came about due to being somewhat tired (11:30pm sleep on wednesday) and not consiously attemting to minimise my inner foot impact.

I have found  through experimentation that running while attempting to put as much weight on the outside of my feet reduces the problem, and also lifting my toes while running seems to make some difference. Whether or not this is good practice however I don't know, and I plan to see a physio if I still have splint problems next week. For the time being I might head back to the shoe shop and change the inner sole of my shoes for one with more support as this will supposedly help too.

As for the jogging I am currently doing 3x4km per week with once again the shin splints being what is holding me back more than muscle fatigue or anything like that. The current pace is 6min/km and that includes a few short walking spells up the steeper hills. If I can get my shin splint problem solved I should be able to upgrade to 5 runs a week without a problem.

Recently I have been playing around a bit with prediction markets, iPredict.co.nz to be specific, and it has been a lot of fun. For the uninitiated a prediction market allows people to buy shares that will yield results depending on the result of a certain event. The core difference between aprediction market and somthing like the TAB is that odds are set by the people participating in the market rather than the market owner (i.e. TAB/iPredict) and that shares that are bought in the prediction market can be on-sold to anyone else in the market at any time.