Movement on 'There will be a National Prime Minister after the 2014 General Election' trade.

I am a little confused about what to me is an 'unexpected' movement in the trades re the next PM being from National or Labour.

Due to the new power policy announced by Labour/Greens and also due to the falling trend in National popularity in polls, I would have expected the Labour PM price to rise and National PM price fall. But the price seems to be doing the opposite. Can some one explain the political or more importantly the trade reasons for this so that I can understand the ipredict naunces better? I see someone in the National PM line has 888 units put in to buy while a day or so earlier someone bought about250 units for Labour PM line. Cheers and thanks in advance for your considered insights.

Presumably people trying to pump for their 'chosen' political player. If you disagree with their prediction, take their money off their hands.

Thank you, but I am wondering is it as simple and obvious as that or is there some other possible reason such as trade tactic/taking profit/cutting loss etc going on?

The absence of some large breaking news (like Key resigning, or a war starting, or a large disaster somewhere etc) the only things we can really assume are:

1. Inside trading, or trading based on relatively concrete information of some sort that is not widely known (upcoming political scandal for example)
2. Naive trading, where someone is bidding up their chosen stock on a basis that is not reflected on anything other than someone's private hopes/wishes.

We saw a lot of #2 on InTrade around the US Presidential elections, particularly around Ron Paul.

Unless someone comes on these forums and publicly cops to doing the bidding up here (so far unprecedented, I think), only time will tell us if it is #1 or #2.

In my experience, it's as simple as that. The money favours the right on this site, which is fantastic for the objectively-minded, or even the pro-left wing trader (which is possibly an oxymoron).

current polls don't equate to what one may expect in polls come election time

As has been frequently pointed out, almost all polls over-estimate the level of support for the National Party because they only sample people who still used land lines.

under 13% of households don't have a landline phone

it'll be a bigger problem trying to figure out the which party the 25% of people that don't turn up for voting support