The irony is that true games of chance like slot machines (and lotteries) that exploit our behavioral wiring are legitimized in the US while most forms of outcome trading (or betting, on sports, events, etc.) is criminalized despite the fact that success in outcome trading is not impossible and indeed is predicated on informed analysis.
And to think, you used to be able to smoke while playing the slots…
It has been a long time since I last wrote about patents - mainly because it gets me really wound up and especially because I don’t have any specialist domain knowledge: in other words, I don’t know what I’m talking about. At least not officially. (I think that is what is called a disclaimer…)
Anyhow, having joyously discovered the excellent AllAboutAlpha (amongst a few other gems of the financial blogosphere thanks to CASTrader), I couldn’t help but to point you towards their Morningstar Patents Saving for Retirement post.
I maintain that one of the chief successes of the financial services industry over the past century has been it’s consistent ability to rapidly disseminate and adopt useful innovations. If this is called into question in the US- via the cancerous use of patent law - well, let’s just say I’d rather be long prime London property than prime New York property. So is this yet another plank to be added to Mayor Bloomberg and Senator Schumer’s report on the (dwindling) competitiveness of US financial markets?
How long will it take the (socio-institutional) legal framework to catch up to the changed technological paradigm? Am I missing something? Isn’t it obvious to anyone that the current US patent regime is entirely unsuited to a world of accelerating technological change based on continuously evolving and recombining information and algorithms? Can the political system produce the leadership needed to adapt the institutional framework to this new reality in the face of a well-organized, wealthy and interested minority of the economy who feed off of the inherent disfunctionality of the system?
Will this be an issue in the run up to November 2008? Probably not - pretty hard to get a rally whipped into a frenzy debating patent law…but something tells me it should be.
Too many end up as clones of the Titanic Deck Chair Rearrangement Corporation. 
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A fictional and speculative look at the possible future of the global financial markets
The right side of the demand curve.
Weather hedging.
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