Friday, November 28, 2008

New Stocks: Ferry Strikes and Building Consents

Two new sets of stocks tonight.

The first group asks about building consents. Earlier today, Statistics NZ announced residential building consents were at their lowest in October since 1992. What's in store for the next four months?

We have launched four stocks aimed at answering this question: BC.NOV08, BC.DEC08, BC.JAN09 and BC.FEB09. These contracts pay $0.01 for each 100 building consents for residential dwelling units granted.

We are using Statistics NZ's Building Consents issued report, usually issued towards the end of month following the period in question.

The other stock launched tonight, thanks to a suggestion by commenter (and trader?) Colonel, asks whether the Interislander will be hit by industrial action during the Christmas/New Year period. The Interislander is a division of Kiwirail which until July this year was owned by Toll NZ and now owned by the NZ government. Early trading is interesting - the contract opened at $0.10 and bounced all the way up to $0.28 before adjusting back to around $0.15. A contract to keep your eye on if you're planning a vacation on the other side of Cook Strait these holidays.

We're aiming to keep rolling out new contracts every few days for time leading up to Christmas. Please keep in mind we are obliged by our authorisation to limit the scope of stocks being offered to those political, business, economic, sociological, or demographic events, and we continue to welcome your ideas.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

i presume the building consents contract is specified in "original" and not "seasonally adjusted terms"?

Matt Burgess said...

Correct.

Anonymous said...

One quick question on the Ferry Strikes contract: the contract states that "Industrial action is taken to include strike, work to rule, overtime ban, and go-slow."

If a cancellation is due to a lock-out, does this count? I assume it does, but this isn't clear.

Unknown said...

Just to change the subject, but it would be nice if the auto login feature could be enabled. It would save entering my username and password 10 times a day!

Cheers

Matt Burgess said...

Anon, yes, includes lock-out. Contract updated to say so, thanks for picking this up.

Carl - we're rebuilding the sessions system on the site at the moment and a by product of that will be remembered logins. You can get a list of current prices in your reader by subscribing to the RSS feed from the front page, and we're launching an API in the next week or so if you either feel like building an external app or using somebody else's.

Anonymous said...

Unfortunately, your rebuild seems to have locked me out. Oh, I can log in - but it doesn't remember across pages and tabs. As a side-effect, i can't trade.

Will it be fixed soon?