If you think he'll be there on Aug 31, then you believe that this contract is "worth" $10 (the "tick size" is $0.10 and the range is 0-100 "ticks"). If you don't think he will be there, then you believe that it's "worth" $0. So let's take the case that you think it's going to be true: how much would you pay (today) for your opinion to be right? The market has shifted since Brad posted, but let's use his numbers anyway: there are two bidders:
> Bid-- 18 contracts @ 9, 10 contracts @ 1
One person would pay $0.90 for up to 18 units of the bet; another person would pay $0.10 for only a single unit of the bet. On the other side of the book there are lots of sellers:
> Ask-- 1 contract @ 99, 3 contracts @ 93,
> 1 contract @ 69, 2 contracts @ 62, and 100 contracts @ 20.
So the person who is "first in line" to sell this bet is the 100 @ $2.00; next in line behind her is someone who wants at least $6.20 for her 2 contracts. And so on. But since the most anyone is willing to pay is $0.90, there's going to be no further trading on this contract until/unless someone steps forward and says "Ok, I'll pay more than $0.90!" or someone else says "Ok, I'll take (a lot) less than $2.00!" ... his conclusion is thus:
> There is thus considerable resistance to the Poindexter contract
> breaking upward of 20...
If this were an actual, liquid market, he'd probably be right. The lack of a significant number of buyers would mean that even if the "18 @ 9" buyer gave in and bought "18 @ 20" (i.e., met the lowest-cost seller's price by more than doubling the amount they were willing to pay), there's still another (100 - 18 = 82) contracts left in the book @ 20. The only other buyer is the "10 @ 1" guy who seems a) unlikely to go all the way to 20 and b) only interested in 10 contracts. So this market looks dead until/unless you can get more participants.
> How do you get the strength of that opinion out of
> the numbers provided?
You can read this market as: The market's "value" of the contract that pays $10 if he has a job on August 31 is pretty low and unlikely to get much higher anytime soon. I'm not sure when Brad looked, but there's a graph there now that shows that the price has been falling all day. There's been a little bit of a bottom-feeder bounce in late trading, but basically people don't think he'll be there. Another way to look at this is that no one is interested in paying $2 on the chance that it's worth $10 in a month.
You can go directly to the quote here:
http://tradesports.com/jsp/intrade/common/c_cd.jsp?conDetailID=38271
Click the "Today" tab to get something useful; I think the contract started today.
/jordan