I normally prefer to make a handful of very large bets that I can establish a high degree of confidence in. But sometimes - especially after the Patriots rip your heart out by losing to a team led by Eli Manning and henceforth establish that there is no order in the world, Einstein and God-does-not-play-dice be damned – doing a bit of gambling to get the feeling of being alive again doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.

Yes, there is an odd zombie-like quality to the Greater Boston area at this time – so be careful when you review any financials from Dunkin Donut’s IPO-to-be that include this month of February, because only excessive caffeine and sugar consumption will pull this region through.

Anyways, if you have watched CNBC in the last week you’ve probably heard mentions of Intrade.com, the futures-style market that allows you to gamble/speculate (your pick) on far too many things – one of those being politics, be it from the Republican or Democratic nominees for President and Vice-President, to the next actual President of the United States. Of course, we could delve into speculation on Pakistani election dates, but I digress…

Right now John McCain is being priced with 92.5% probability of winning the Republican nomination, with no other candidate above 3%. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are in a dead tie, each within a few tenths of 49.7% depending on the last trade. With markets like this, how can you not love America?

Probability of John McCain Winning Presidential Election, Last Week:

The odds given to both Democratic candidates to singularly win the election are around 32%, with John McCain at 35% to win the election. The basic thesis for this speculation is that once the media hoopla surrounding the heatedly contested Democratic primary dies down and the winner emerges to face McCain, people will suddenly realize that this election is going to be very close – likely similar to what we’ve seen in 2000 and 2004, and thus pricing McCain at a large discount to a 50-50 coin flip doesn’t make much sense.

But again, this is just pure speculation on my part and not in any way a political statement (sorry Dad) – chalk it up to the novelty of this whole idea…

Of course, the real fun will occur when we get serious arbitrageurs into the Intrade market, because numerically speaking there are opportunities - just a lack of liquidity and scale to enable one to extract reasonable profits. Can you say non-correlated returns?

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