“Event study ” is the term of art for an empirical analyses of the impact of unanticipated or newly disseminated information on market indexes or the share prices of individual firms. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of studies published each year in academic journals that examine the impacts of a wide variety of “events.”

And while the Intrade volume is probably too low to be considered an efficient market, the event itself, i.e. BHO’s totally excellent overseas adventure, would seem to be an event worthy of consideration.

For the last four years I have semi-regulary I regularly follow the prediction markets at Intrade and the Iowa Electronic Markets. For fun, I also like to examine the impact of geo-political events on global markets, particularly on commodity prices, e.g. oil and gas. My preferred method is to look over several charts for the same event and see if they agree or diverge. I have yet to do this for the BHO World Tour and have no prior expectation about what the effect ought to be.

That said, your observation that Intrade has caused shares of BHO Global to dip is interesting and worthy of closer examination. My guess is that the odds-makers agree with sentiments I saw expressed at National Review and other conservative outlets over the past week i.e. that in general, being loved by Europe and the world (let alone by 100′s of thousand of excited Germans) is not necessarily a positive thing for a US presidential candidate and that, in particular, BHO’s “We are the World” rhetoric is not going to play well, not even in Peoria.