Want to put your money where your mouth is? Here's how.

A comment by esteemed reader Huck Finn on the post below regarding the ever expanding field of candidates for 2008 mentioned that he wished there was some sort of stock market for the field of candidates.

I knew of the Iowa Political Markets, which is famous for being more accurate than Gallup polls when it comes to predicting winners. But they so far only offer markets on which party's candidate will win the popular vote, and vote share by party.

I wondered if there was somewhere people could trade on individual candidates, and a little bit of searching found that there is.

Intrade.com offers the chance to put your money on hundreds of different markets, and includes several political books, including U.S. Presidential election overall, or by state, passage of prominent bills, such as minimum wage, and approval polls and whether they'll move up or down.

At the moment, Hillary Clinton last traded at 46.7 in heavy volume and Obama at 20.3, (which can be translated as percent chance of winning). Vilsack is trading at 1.4, tied with Kerry. (but ahead of Blagojevich who's at a whopping 0.1)

On the Republican side, unsurprisingly John McCain leads at 42.2 trailed by Giuliani at 17.2 and Romney at 16.7.

Go to their home page and then click on the Markets tab in the center under their logo. (unfortunately I can't provide direct links to specific pages.) From there click on Politics in the list of catagories on the left to find the political markets.

As you can see when you look over the site, you can bet on just about anything, including the weather! The legal catagory even offers markets on the outcome of the Scooter Libby and Tom Delay legal cases. (By the way, look for very bad things to be coming Dick "Dick" Cheney's way in this case. It's been revealed that he not only called for the outing of a CIA agent, he even dictated the wording of the leak and then instructed the White House press sec. to lie about who knew about it. A memo from ol' Dick also says he wanted to protect Libby when it was apparent that he was being set up as fall guy to protect Rove. Very hot stuff if the media pursues it.)

Though it seems most pundits couldn't predict 6:00 if it was 5:30, Intrade is a great place for news or political junkies with a gambling instinct to put their money where their mouth is.

But don't come crying to me if you lose your shirt. (Though you're welcome to share a portion of your loot if you make out big.)