For the first time in my life, I've voted for the winning candidate in an election, namely Paul Dewar of the NDP! In fact, he ended up winning by a fairly large margin, which surprised me. Another surprising thing is that the NDP ended up with more seats than ever in Ontario!

Below are the final results. As you can see, both predictions came very close. Teodora and I ended up making about $27 on the stock market, which is not bad interest for an investment of $400 over a month!

Liberal: 103
Conservative: 124
NDP: 29
Bloc Quebecois: 51
Others: 1

Well, the Election Stock Market closed last night, and final prices would put the parties as follows:

Liberal: 93
Conservative: 127
NDP: 33
Bloc Quebecois: 54
Others: 1

The Election Prediction Project, which does a riding-by-riding analysis based on user-submitted commentaries, calls for:

Liberal: 104
Conservative: 118
NDP: 29
Bloc Quebecois: 56
Others: 1

Things are looking good for the NDP, but then again, the Election Prediction Project greatly overestimated the NDP last time, so I'm not getting my hopes up. In any case, it looks like Teodora and I will end up about $20 ahead in the stock market!

Here's a cool idea: a stock market where you can trade in shares of the political parties. The final values of the shares will be determined by the election results, so if you can accurately predict the results, you can make some money by buying shares that are undervalued and selling ones that are overvalued. It's all done with real money, so you have a financial incentive to make serious predictions.

Teodora and I have been participating since the market opened on December 13, and so far we've managed to lose $10 or so. But there's still a couple weeks to go, so hopefully we can make that back and maybe end up a bit ahead.

This is definitely a cool project to get involved in if you're interested in politics. It's actually a research project being done by the University of British Columbia. They've had similar markets for previous elections, and they've done a pretty good job of predicting the final results.