From: Scott Brickner <sjb@austin.ibm.com>
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 95 11:20:04 PDT
To: shamrock@netcom.com (Lucky Green)
Subject: Re: A glance at the future of missing child identification
In-Reply-To: <199508210136.VAA09171@bb.hks.net>
Message-ID: <9508231819.AA19515@ozymandias.austin.ibm.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Lucky Green writes
>BTW, is there a futures market that allows you to bet real money?

If you mean something like Idea Futures, but with real money, I haven't
seen one.  I *have* seen "Iowa Electronic Markets", run by U Iowa, which
has real-money futures on certain political campaigns (Presidential,
Republican Convention, and Powell Nomination).

See <URL:http://www.biz.uiowa.edu/iem/index.html>.

I e-mailed the person responsible asking about the legalities of doing
such a thing, as true gambling on presidential elections isn't legal.
She indicated that they had a letter from the appropriate governmental
agency which promised to take no action as long as they adhered to
certain limits (a maximum on purchases being the most significant).

Apparently they've already had requests to make some fairly *large*
($500,000 or more) investments.