Website lets public take a punt 

Who's going to be our next prime minister? Will the price of petrol be $3 a litre by Christmas? These burning questions are now being answered on a Victoria University website.

And the new online Futures trading site, iPredict , can also make you some money.

I-Predict is approved by the Securities Commission and works a bit like a stock exchange - people buy and sell contracts but they only make money if a predicted event comes true.

People are limited on how much they can spend, a maximum of $2000 a year. It's value is in its accuracy.

The first site of this kind started in the United States 20 years ago and has successfully predicted the outcome of every US presidential race.

"The people who trade the contracts on the prediction market are people who have an interest in those contracts and have knowledge about them," says Victoria University deputy vice chancellor Professor Neil Quigley.

One of the big money spinners on the site is expected to be the possibility of NZ's suspended foreign affairs minister either resigning from the post or being sacked - and traders believe there's about a 68% chance of that happening.

And while politics may offer some affordable fun, the team sees some serious applications for their software.

"You can take prediction markets and point it at all sorts of questions that business and government departments care about, so you could ask questions like what's our sales going to be, which ideas on the drawing board are going to make the most money for us," says chief executive Matt Burgess.

The site officially launches on Tuesday.