Barack Obama is the odds-on favorite -- for now -- to win both tomorrow's New Hampshire primary and the Democratic presidential nomination, according to traders at Dublin-based Trade Exchange Network Co., where people can buy and sell "shares" in political events.

The Illinois senator, who upset Hilary Clinton in last week's Iowa caucuses, stands a good chance of repeating his success in tomorrow's New Hampshire primary. The Trade Exchange's Intrade system shows Obama with a 90% change of winning the New Hampshire primary, to Clinton's 8.7% and John Edwards' 0.6%. Obama is being given a 66% chance of winning the nomination, compared with 32% for Hillary Clinton and 3% for John Edwards.

On the Republican side, traders are expecting John McCain to have an easy time beating back former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, with an 82% chance of victory to Romney's 14%, in line with conventional wisdom. Chances for Iowa caucus winner Mike Huckabee and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani appear somewhere between slim and none. McCain retains the edge to win the nomination, with a 4 percentage point lead on Giuliani and double-digit leads over the remaining candidates, online traders say.

Though the data is interesting, people should take it with a grain of salt -- no make that a truckload of salt. The political winds blow in many different directions as primary season heats up. Remember, it wasn't that long ago that pundits expected Clinton and McCain to win their respective primaries easily.

The recent Barron's cover story which anointed Mitt Romney and Bill Richardson as the candidates best suited for investors contained this political propaganda: "Polls show that most Americans consider estate taxes to be unjust."

That statement is misleading.

The latest Gallup poll on the topic from 2000 showed that 53% of people surveyed didn't know enough about the estate tax to have an opinion. Once the issue was explained to them, 60% said they favored eliminating it though only 17% said they would personally benefit from such a move.

Exactly how this was explained isn't clear and a recent Yale University paper argued that people's opposition to the estate tax evaporates once they learn how few people actually pay the tax and the enormous $30 billion to $40 billion hole it would leave in the federal budget if it were repealed.