The UBC Election Stock Market proved to be a lot of fun during the 2008 election, as Canadians could bet up to $1000 on the outcome they expected. For some of us, it proved to be expensive fun, but fun nevertheless.

The good news is, the market is back, just in time for this spring’s BC election. Once again, you can buy shares for popular vote, seat totals, and outcome. The neat thing about prediction markets is they’re more forward looking than polls because people are betting on what they think will happen – not necessarily how much support each party has at the moment.

There’s likely not enough buy-in yet to extract much meaning from the market, but it currently pegs NDP support at around 44-47% and the Liberals at 31-35% – with the Liberals as 8% long-shots to form a majority government. That aligns closely with the most recent polling numbers, but if a time ever comes when those figures diverge, I’d be more inclined to bet on the market than the polls.

Case in point – in last year’s Alberta election, a sort of no-money prediction market set up by Daveberta and myself saw nearly one-third of participants predict a PC victory, even though every single poll had the Wildrosers cruising to victory. Yes, some of that was likely Tories who had never lost an election in their lives drinking the cool-aid, but a lot of the top entries were from campaign insiders whose own internal numbers and sense of what was happening on the ground proved to be more accurate than week-old robo-dial polls.