There's a saying in poker that if you sit down at the table and can't immediately find the donkey(1), you are the donkey. At some point, anyone playing around in a prediction without insider info will be the donkey.
The value of that to the public is pretty minimal though, seeing as that private information becomes public 1-4 hours before it would've been publicized in the more traditional way. And the signal itself is extremely noisy.
We get it but what good is it if the insiders come and bet mere hours before the event happens? So we could have known a few hours early? I feel like this is just people trying to justify gambling. In the UK bookies have been doing this forever, it's nothing new. It's just gambling.
The way it's working though is that they don't provide much information, because there's very little time between their public bet and the outcome they bet on.
Now look at Polymarket's advertising. It is 100% presented as a gambling platform, not an information discovery system. There is nothing saying "don't play if you don't have insider information." I do not think that we can reasonably fall back on this defense of these platforms anymore.
I also don't much societal value in these platform's ability to suggest political events a few hours before they happen.
And this wasn't even really the original theoretical claim for these markets. The goal was to financially incentivize research and deep investigation, not to financially incentivize people who have access to hidden information by default. If somebody developed a system for predicting cease fires and used that to win in these markets then we've created a new thing for society. If somebody is just in the room when a cease fire is decided we haven't progressed society at all. All we've done is create a new way for people with power to extract personal wealth.
Yes, I suppose. Remember people are parts of various nations. Your "national security threat" might be a "national security opportunity" for someone else ;)
Leaking classified information is a crime, and I don't see why foreign adversaries can't monitor Polymarket to get advanced warning of military actions. A less corrupt US government would ban betting on matters involving national security.
Also I doubt any adversary worth their salt needs to monitor Polymarket.
I remember reading once that when the US was working on the SR-71 Blackbird out in the desert the Soviets could read its cross section by using satellites to pick up the thermal signature its presence on the ground left behind. State level actors aren't doing pedestrian stuff like watching pizza deliveries to guess what the Pentagon is up to.
Imagine you elect the president because he promises he will finish wars instead of starting them. And after it's elected, he's doing exactly the opposite. Philosophical question: ws he elected 'duly'?
Executive orders and other decrees that read like a demented toddler, announced in the middle of the night, on a a third rate social media site.... as its always been.
Who should have never been allowed to run, both for his felony criminal conviction, his plot to tamper with the election, and of course the assault on the capitol. This is before we even add on the Epstein stuff, or his latest war.
It’s pretty clear Trump is a threat and everyone in his orbit needs to end up in prison.
No, its main function is to extract as much money as possible from those who bet without that private information and without ability to influence bets. They do not actually make the information public.
How does making a wager cause insider info to be public? All it means is an anonymous account placed money on the outcome, how does it make public anything that an insider knows? It doesn’t.
It incentives them to keep the info secret in order to profit or a wager on a related outcome. The insider info remains secret, all people know is some bloke stood up a new account and placed a big bet.
And for these short timespan bets, it seems utterly useless. If the wagers were only allowed on things two weeks out, and not allow bets on short term events then maybe it could show more info.
The price movement is the indicator that there is insider information.
Of course there are lots of problems with this theory - in large markets a single trader has to make large bets to move the market, and with the current leadership the price moves large amounts unpredictably as well based on the latest statements.
But the mechanism itself makes sense.
It's unclear if that's a good thing. Of course some people know secret information before hand. Is disclosing that always good?
Another problem is, people may actually want to bet on random outcomes, because of money laundering or simply because this is how gambling essentially works. That huge account could be an insider or a billionaire with a few hundreds k to burn. Or maybe they want to orient people’s opinions towards a certain outcome.
Claiming that price movement in a prediction market reveals some amount of truth implicitly assumes that:
- people bet on something they believe to be true, and not to sway other people’s opinions or simply to burn money,
- people bet on something they believe to be true because they have specific private information (e.g. I bet on the Red Sox not because I think they’re good but because I know things other don’t about their opponents, their physical conditions and so on).
- their belief is actually correct (eg if I’m in the CIA and I know that the Soviets are about to launch a nuclear missile I can bet on it… but I don’t know that an officer down the line will refuse to do that).
Even if this was true, there is an issue of timing and consequences. Example: imagine it’s 2011 and some CIA or DoD officer makes huge, sudden bets on the fact that Bin Laden will be caught. Some AQ people get wind of this and move Bin Laden somewhere else. Congrats, your price movement signaled non public information to the market!
Another issue is that these bets tend to rely on public sources, news reports and so on. A journalist in Israel was threatened to change his news reports so that certain people didn’t have to lose on a prediction market. This could become more and more common, and with the advent of AI generated pictures who are you going to believe? Are you losing money because you bet on the wrong outcome or simply because someone with enough resources ensured that your outcome was never going to be reported?
> Congrats, your price movement signaled non public information to the market!
so from bin laden's perspective, this would've been a good outcome isnt it?
Can't say what a good outcome is without saying who.
What if enemies of the USA had corrupt generals who also make bets on anti-US actions to profit personally, and inadvertently reveal information to the CIA/NSA, who then prevent such anti-US actions? Would that not have been a good outcome as well?
Information is information - and one cannot say if it's good or not. However, i am a believer that more information generally do good than bad - assuming the consumer of said information is smart.
> Are you losing money because you bet on the wrong outcome ...
It doesnt matter, because you chose to bet. You do not need to bet in order to make use of the information being revealed by those who are betting.
>so from bin laden's perspective, this would've been a good outcome isnt it?
Of course
> Information is information - and one cannot say if it's good or not. However, i am a believer that more information generally do good than bad - assuming the consumer of said information is smart
Smart doesn’t always equal good.
The consumer can be smart and use the information to benefit themselves (and possibly harming others), but this doesn’t necessarily justify releasing information. In fact, even Snowden, who famously released a lot of information, didn’t release everything. He applied his judgment and avoided publishing some stuff. Was his judgment correct? I don’t know. The question is - at some point, is information release always neutral?
> Are you losing money because you bet on the wrong outcome ...
It doesnt matter, because you chose to bet. You do not need to bet in order to make use of the information being revealed by those who are betting.
What I’m saying is, if I bet on event X and X happens, I would expect to be paid. Instead I may not get paid simply because someone else who bet against X has the power to suppress any proof of X happening (via threats, money,…). This doesn’t happen with regular sport bets because sport events inherently have a lot of witnesses (physically present at the place where things are happening), there are referees, the teams themselves advertise the results, there is a professional league keeping scores and so on. If you bet on someone getting killed abroad by some military abroad, or military skirmish happening in a remote place, or other plausible but hard to verify event, faking something with AI or a friendly reporter is easier. And because people use cryptocurrencies in this platform, how can you prove active manipulation vs bona fide in some video some reporter published? “Hey, I just saw this video, who knew it was wrong?”.
The argument that you can lose money simply because it’s a bet, even when you should have won, is not convincing. Ok, I can lose but if I win shouldn’t I get the money?
But that’s not the claim people bandy about on the gambling markets.
They claim it incentives sharing of info, but what you’re saying is it’s only sharing meta info. That the info remains secret and the wagers reveal that it’s possible insider info exists - not what the info is.
Honestly, this has all the same smell as NFT justifications. I’d be suprised if the main touts of prediction markets weren’t previously touting NFTs and “smart” contracts. Actually, it even seems like the markets are inspired by those.
I'm so tired of hearing this explanation. It completely ignores reality. As everyone has said, what's the point? You get information 2 minutes ahead of time? But how do you know that guy actually has the real info? Because he put a lot of money on it? Okay, then how am I supposed to make use of that information.
I'm so tired of people parroting this line as if it somehow explains everything. These new Prediction Markets are nothing but a new way of gambling. period.
> These new Prediction Markets are nothing but a new way of gambling.
There are two kinds of participants, those with inside information and liquidity providers. The liquidity providers incentivize the insiders to share the information.
Yes sure there are gamblers, but here they're doing something useful – providing liquidity. If they just went to the casino, the money would be lost without any useful output.
Can someone explain to me how we haven’t regulated the hell out of the clearly illegal sector of betting on shit that can clearly be insider-traded with little to no scrutiny?
Does it need to be regulated? This isn’t pension funds placing bets risking people’s investment money.
People using Polymarket are gambling on pretty random things and must understand the risk
, whether it is on major geopolitical events or someone counting cars going through a junction these events can all be manipulated pretty easily.
People want to gamble on random things? Let them.
If anything is regulate the other side, people in government can’t use sites like polymarket because I don’t want them making stupid decisions so bets fall one side or another.
Polymarket gamblers have pressured at least one journalist regarding reporting of missile strikes. This requires regulation or, as others here have suggested, non-anonymity, maybe other measures too.
It's already illegal to threaten journalists. In America we generally make bad things illegal, not activities that could become motivation for bad things. Someone threatened me on League of Legends last week. Should we ban the game?
>In America we generally make bad things illegal, not activities that could become motivation for bad things.
Not really, even in America. Like, take alcohol regulation. Your model would be "drunken bar fights are already illegal, so just prosecute that, problem solved."
Except that, historically, there's so much of that that it overwhelms the ability of law enforcement to keep up. So we try to remove the driving factors: "Okay, you can drink in public, but only[1] at these licensed places that are heavily incentivized to prevent fights before they start."
I'm not advocating any particular position, I'm just saying that if there's a persistent situation that heavily incentivizes violence, then it's not unreasonable to push back on that mechanism rather than just try to mop up the violence after the fact. Which specific situations merit that is up for debate, but it shouldn't be controversial that some situations should be handled this way.
[1] Yes, I'm simplifying, just focus on the general point here.
What if 100% of the bets you place in a slot machine go to the owner? It's the exact same thing here.
Slot machines are regulated so the game is fair and they're not simply machines where the rich steal from the poor. Such a machine would be scam by definition.
I'm not a polymarket gambler or a gambler at all really, so I have no skin in this game but why does it have to be fair?
I would say casinos and slot machines are already stealing from the poor and giving to the rich and already a scam, people play them (aside from addicts) because there is a chance they will win, they know not everyone wins.
I'm in favour of people being treated fairly I just think regulation isn't what is required here, more education "play this but the odds are tilted away from you".
It would actually be better if slot machines never paid out and 100% of their bets went to the house. Very very few people would use them. They're addictive exactly because they do pay out sometimes.
Hmm interesting, my gut is that i'm not against it. I think in reality it does happen (take a look at Lucas Paqueta in UK soccer) so may as well accept it - you'll never know who has more to lose (win) a player betting their side will lose or a player on the opponent side betting their side will lose so it should even out.
Gambling is a risk, it isn't just the house's edge but anything can go wrong on the day.
I would suggest at least having KYC (know your customer) rules which all banks, financial exchanges and traditional online bookmakers are required to implement would be reasonable for these markets?
At least it would somewhat hinder the type of activity we’ve seen (where journalists are threatened by criminals to withdraw or change their stories) without just banning such betting exchanges outright.
I think making the bets not anonymous is sufficient imho.
If a gov't official (including the president) is leaking classified information, there's already laws about that isnt there? (Whether it's effective is another question - i'm assuming it's currently effective).
Its potentially much worse: we don't know if the threats and bets are isolated. While diplomacy happens, the threats may very well be exaggerated to create the market opportunity.
It's even worse. A federal court just ruled that these markets cannot be meaningfully regulated by states because they are selling financial instruments rather than providing a gambling platform and federal law preempts state regulation on these financial instruments.
I mean... insiders are betting on war crimes. Yes, the insider betting is bad but it doesn't even touch the edges compared to committing war crimes. And if the government is committing war crimes, why would they care about something so inconsequential as betting on them?
I wanted to reply, but I think I just don't understand your comment at all.
Are you saying the "sector of betting on shit that can clearly be insider-traded" is illegal? Does that include like gold and S&P500?
The way I see it, prediction markets' main function is to connect gamblers with insiders posessing useful information. Are you concerned for the gamblers losing? But they were gonna lose anyway, one way or the other. Or are you concerned about the insiders winning? Sucks, but at least the public gets information by way of the prediction market being more accurate.
People want very smart people to wager on future events to make public the best information possible. Okay, so when these super-predictors get fleece by insiders, then what?
Having any uncertainty market where insider information is not considered cheating is a complete waste of time. The insiders will always win, everyone else will slowly lose even if they are smart as hell.
Just imagine playing poker at a table where one in a thousand people can see all the hole cards. The entire game is for them to wait you to put all your money on the table when they already know the winning move. Even if you can win enough to stay in the game, they can take you for everything in one play when you get something wrong that you were very certain of.
So I follow the oil and gas industry and markets. For anyone that doesn't know, commodity markets mostly operate two different markets: futures and spot. Futures contracts are an agreement to deliver (or take delivery, depending on which side you're on) a certain quantity of a standardized commodity at a given date. Futures markets tend to be a mix of speculators (who are simply betting on price movements of the underlying) and traders who produce or want the underlying. The advantage of a futures contract is it can allow someone to hedge their costs and lock-in prices. All sorts of producers and industries use them for that.
Oil futures are standardized into several standard types (9 I think, I might be off). You will hear terms like West Texas crude and Brent. This refers to two main factors: the relative mix between lighter and heavier hydrocarbons (called the API gravity) in the oil as well as the sulfur content.
One side benefit of all this is discovery. It's a way of measuring sentiment. So if future oil prices rise, it indicates market sentiment is negative about the war and they further disruption is expected. When it looks like hostilities may end, the price drops.
But there's a problem: nobody trusts the market anymore. It's being manipulated as insiders are clearly frontrunning news with massive bets, sometimes minutes before news gets released. This has been happening with other markets too, most notably SPY futures. Markets cease to function once manipulation becomes widespread.
The future price is also called the paper price and another signal that the paper price is meaningless is that the spot or physical price for oil has skyrocketed well beyond any oil prices you might see in the news. For example, a few weeks ago, physical Dubai oil was nearing $180 per barrel. West Texas crude had a future price of $110 yet the physical price was $140+.
An issue here is that the physical price isn't easily discoverable. It's hidden behind subscription services that cost thousands so you only hear about it when it's reported on. But this means talking heads are reporting on $110 oil when it's really $150.
We saw a similar mismatch with the silver market at the end of last year. That market too was clearly being manipulated but rather than insiders, many (including myself) suspect it was the refiners and others who had lost with silver's massive rally and were doing everything to pop the bubble, including changing the exchange's liquidity ratios to force sales.
In previous years, some or all of these people would get investigated and prosecuted by the SEC for insider trading. That agency has been defanged by putting a pro-deregulation loyalist in charge but the bigger problem is that some or all of these people will be buying pardons before the president leaves office. And the president can no longer be prosecuted thanks to the Supreme Court inventing presidential immunity.
One source of American power is the control over the global financial system. All of this insider trading risks dismantling that. It's not hard to find people who are sitting out because they simply don't trust anything anymore. If this spreads to financial institutions and institutional traders, that's going to be a big problem.
So-called "prediction markets" (and crypto) are even less regulated than that. Unless you have insider knowledge or you're betting on something that isn't prone to insider information (and I honestly don't know what that would be), I'd stay away.
And these prediction markets are small fry. SPY futures are a significantly larger market. So is oil and gas. And Treasuries is order of magnitudes bigger than either of those. Yet some of those markets can't be trusted and I suspect this is only going to get worse.
I don't have any hope that anyone will ever be prosecuted for any of this.
It can be said that Trump's "tweets" on that day were strategically engineered to first bring this bet to near zero before ultimately bring it to a hundred. In this way, the maximum winnings could be made by someone with insider knowledge.
Is there really that much liquidity in these bets? Polymarket is just a broker right? So people are putting up tens of millions cumulatively on the other side of these random bets?
This isn't useful information without also knowing how common it is for newly-created accounts to place and lose bets around that size. Polymarket is a large platform with a lot of accounts being created per day. If two accounts made large bets and won and eight accounts made large bets and lost, you haven't discovered anything interesting.
I wonder if this sort of corruption will become a new negotiation tactic.
Give us what we want and we'll delay the announcement long enough for you to make preparations.
I don't know how Polymarket works, so maybe you can enlighten me: can Polymarket be subpoenaed to provide the recipients of the payouts? Is there some insulation to keep them ignorant of their identity?
I've tried to have sympathy for people who lose money gambling but I just can't. Maybe some argument can be made for the fool who loses money on something silly like a sports game, but people certainly not for people trying to make a buck off of death an destruction.
Trump Jr. is invested in Polymarket via 1789 Capital. So the Trump volatility by hourly policy reversals on "Truth" "Social" benefits the gambling industry as a whole as well as insider betting.
Iran correctly figured out that by threatening the OpenAI data center, where the Kushner family has shares, could move Trump to call off the infrastructure strikes. Or it played a role at least. Maybe the strike is postponed until after the OpenAI IPO.
138 comments
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_poker_terms#donkey
Now look at Polymarket's advertising. It is 100% presented as a gambling platform, not an information discovery system. There is nothing saying "don't play if you don't have insider information." I do not think that we can reasonably fall back on this defense of these platforms anymore.
I also don't much societal value in these platform's ability to suggest political events a few hours before they happen.
And this wasn't even really the original theoretical claim for these markets. The goal was to financially incentivize research and deep investigation, not to financially incentivize people who have access to hidden information by default. If somebody developed a system for predicting cease fires and used that to win in these markets then we've created a new thing for society. If somebody is just in the room when a cease fire is decided we haven't progressed society at all. All we've done is create a new way for people with power to extract personal wealth.
> I don't see why foreign adversaries can't monitor Polymarket to get advanced warning of military actions.
They can and I'm sure they do. If you were about to be hit by the most powerful army in the world, wouldn't you want to have some advance warning?
I remember reading once that when the US was working on the SR-71 Blackbird out in the desert the Soviets could read its cross section by using satellites to pick up the thermal signature its presence on the ground left behind. State level actors aren't doing pedestrian stuff like watching pizza deliveries to guess what the Pentagon is up to.
> A duly elected President, as it’s always been.
Imagine you elect the president because he promises he will finish wars instead of starting them. And after it's elected, he's doing exactly the opposite. Philosophical question: ws he elected 'duly'?
> ws he elected 'duly' (sic)
Yes
It’s pretty clear Trump is a threat and everyone in his orbit needs to end up in prison.
Second off: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgawtcOBBjr-xOvmmc6y3...
Third off: His felony conviction should have resulted in jail time.
Finally: Any one of these should have been disqualifying. This is before we get into Trump's role in the Trump-Epstein files.
It incentives them to keep the info secret in order to profit or a wager on a related outcome. The insider info remains secret, all people know is some bloke stood up a new account and placed a big bet.
And for these short timespan bets, it seems utterly useless. If the wagers were only allowed on things two weeks out, and not allow bets on short term events then maybe it could show more info.
Of course there are lots of problems with this theory - in large markets a single trader has to make large bets to move the market, and with the current leadership the price moves large amounts unpredictably as well based on the latest statements.
But the mechanism itself makes sense.
It's unclear if that's a good thing. Of course some people know secret information before hand. Is disclosing that always good?
Claiming that price movement in a prediction market reveals some amount of truth implicitly assumes that:
- people bet on something they believe to be true, and not to sway other people’s opinions or simply to burn money,
- people bet on something they believe to be true because they have specific private information (e.g. I bet on the Red Sox not because I think they’re good but because I know things other don’t about their opponents, their physical conditions and so on).
- their belief is actually correct (eg if I’m in the CIA and I know that the Soviets are about to launch a nuclear missile I can bet on it… but I don’t know that an officer down the line will refuse to do that).
Even if this was true, there is an issue of timing and consequences. Example: imagine it’s 2011 and some CIA or DoD officer makes huge, sudden bets on the fact that Bin Laden will be caught. Some AQ people get wind of this and move Bin Laden somewhere else. Congrats, your price movement signaled non public information to the market!
Another issue is that these bets tend to rely on public sources, news reports and so on. A journalist in Israel was threatened to change his news reports so that certain people didn’t have to lose on a prediction market. This could become more and more common, and with the advent of AI generated pictures who are you going to believe? Are you losing money because you bet on the wrong outcome or simply because someone with enough resources ensured that your outcome was never going to be reported?
> Congrats, your price movement signaled non public information to the market!
so from bin laden's perspective, this would've been a good outcome isnt it?
Can't say what a good outcome is without saying who.
What if enemies of the USA had corrupt generals who also make bets on anti-US actions to profit personally, and inadvertently reveal information to the CIA/NSA, who then prevent such anti-US actions? Would that not have been a good outcome as well?
Information is information - and one cannot say if it's good or not. However, i am a believer that more information generally do good than bad - assuming the consumer of said information is smart.
> Are you losing money because you bet on the wrong outcome ...
It doesnt matter, because you chose to bet. You do not need to bet in order to make use of the information being revealed by those who are betting.
>so from bin laden's perspective, this would've been a good outcome isnt it?
Of course
> Information is information - and one cannot say if it's good or not. However, i am a believer that more information generally do good than bad - assuming the consumer of said information is smart
Smart doesn’t always equal good. The consumer can be smart and use the information to benefit themselves (and possibly harming others), but this doesn’t necessarily justify releasing information. In fact, even Snowden, who famously released a lot of information, didn’t release everything. He applied his judgment and avoided publishing some stuff. Was his judgment correct? I don’t know. The question is - at some point, is information release always neutral?
> Are you losing money because you bet on the wrong outcome ... It doesnt matter, because you chose to bet. You do not need to bet in order to make use of the information being revealed by those who are betting.
What I’m saying is, if I bet on event X and X happens, I would expect to be paid. Instead I may not get paid simply because someone else who bet against X has the power to suppress any proof of X happening (via threats, money,…). This doesn’t happen with regular sport bets because sport events inherently have a lot of witnesses (physically present at the place where things are happening), there are referees, the teams themselves advertise the results, there is a professional league keeping scores and so on. If you bet on someone getting killed abroad by some military abroad, or military skirmish happening in a remote place, or other plausible but hard to verify event, faking something with AI or a friendly reporter is easier. And because people use cryptocurrencies in this platform, how can you prove active manipulation vs bona fide in some video some reporter published? “Hey, I just saw this video, who knew it was wrong?”.
The argument that you can lose money simply because it’s a bet, even when you should have won, is not convincing. Ok, I can lose but if I win shouldn’t I get the money?
But that’s not the claim people bandy about on the gambling markets.
They claim it incentives sharing of info, but what you’re saying is it’s only sharing meta info. That the info remains secret and the wagers reveal that it’s possible insider info exists - not what the info is.
Honestly, this has all the same smell as NFT justifications. I’d be suprised if the main touts of prediction markets weren’t previously touting NFTs and “smart” contracts. Actually, it even seems like the markets are inspired by those.
I'm so tired of people parroting this line as if it somehow explains everything. These new Prediction Markets are nothing but a new way of gambling. period.
> These new Prediction Markets are nothing but a new way of gambling.
There are two kinds of participants, those with inside information and liquidity providers. The liquidity providers incentivize the insiders to share the information.
Yes sure there are gamblers, but here they're doing something useful – providing liquidity. If they just went to the casino, the money would be lost without any useful output.
Leaders? Are you awake at the wheel?
People using Polymarket are gambling on pretty random things and must understand the risk , whether it is on major geopolitical events or someone counting cars going through a junction these events can all be manipulated pretty easily.
People want to gamble on random things? Let them.
If anything is regulate the other side, people in government can’t use sites like polymarket because I don’t want them making stupid decisions so bets fall one side or another.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/18/polymarket-gam...
> It's already illegal to threaten journalists [in] America
Not necessarily, it depends on the pressure and the intent.
> In America we generally make bad things illegal, not activities that could become motivation for bad things.
I didn't mention making anything illegal. I suggested constraining Polymarket and similar.
> Should we ban [X]
I didn't mention banning anything.
>In America we generally make bad things illegal, not activities that could become motivation for bad things.
Not really, even in America. Like, take alcohol regulation. Your model would be "drunken bar fights are already illegal, so just prosecute that, problem solved."
Except that, historically, there's so much of that that it overwhelms the ability of law enforcement to keep up. So we try to remove the driving factors: "Okay, you can drink in public, but only[1] at these licensed places that are heavily incentivized to prevent fights before they start."
I'm not advocating any particular position, I'm just saying that if there's a persistent situation that heavily incentivizes violence, then it's not unreasonable to push back on that mechanism rather than just try to mop up the violence after the fact. Which specific situations merit that is up for debate, but it shouldn't be controversial that some situations should be handled this way.
[1] Yes, I'm simplifying, just focus on the general point here.
What if 100% of the bets you place in a slot machine go to the owner? It's the exact same thing here.
Slot machines are regulated so the game is fair and they're not simply machines where the rich steal from the poor. Such a machine would be scam by definition.
I would say casinos and slot machines are already stealing from the poor and giving to the rich and already a scam, people play them (aside from addicts) because there is a chance they will win, they know not everyone wins.
I'm in favour of people being treated fairly I just think regulation isn't what is required here, more education "play this but the odds are tilted away from you".
Gambling is a risk, it isn't just the house's edge but anything can go wrong on the day.
At least it would somewhat hinder the type of activity we’ve seen (where journalists are threatened by criminals to withdraw or change their stories) without just banning such betting exchanges outright.
If a gov't official (including the president) is leaking classified information, there's already laws about that isnt there? (Whether it's effective is another question - i'm assuming it's currently effective).
>This isn’t pension funds placing bets risking people’s investment
Its potentially much worse: we don't know if the threats and bets are isolated. While diplomacy happens, the threats may very well be exaggerated to create the market opportunity.
Are you saying the "sector of betting on shit that can clearly be insider-traded" is illegal? Does that include like gold and S&P500?
The way I see it, prediction markets' main function is to connect gamblers with insiders posessing useful information. Are you concerned for the gamblers losing? But they were gonna lose anyway, one way or the other. Or are you concerned about the insiders winning? Sucks, but at least the public gets information by way of the prediction market being more accurate.
>
as records show substantial betsThey're not bets anymore. Now they're swaps.
Having any uncertainty market where insider information is not considered cheating is a complete waste of time. The insiders will always win, everyone else will slowly lose even if they are smart as hell.
Just imagine playing poker at a table where one in a thousand people can see all the hole cards. The entire game is for them to wait you to put all your money on the table when they already know the winning move. Even if you can win enough to stay in the game, they can take you for everything in one play when you get something wrong that you were very certain of.
Oil futures are standardized into several standard types (9 I think, I might be off). You will hear terms like West Texas crude and Brent. This refers to two main factors: the relative mix between lighter and heavier hydrocarbons (called the API gravity) in the oil as well as the sulfur content.
One side benefit of all this is discovery. It's a way of measuring sentiment. So if future oil prices rise, it indicates market sentiment is negative about the war and they further disruption is expected. When it looks like hostilities may end, the price drops.
But there's a problem: nobody trusts the market anymore. It's being manipulated as insiders are clearly frontrunning news with massive bets, sometimes minutes before news gets released. This has been happening with other markets too, most notably SPY futures. Markets cease to function once manipulation becomes widespread.
The future price is also called the paper price and another signal that the paper price is meaningless is that the spot or physical price for oil has skyrocketed well beyond any oil prices you might see in the news. For example, a few weeks ago, physical Dubai oil was nearing $180 per barrel. West Texas crude had a future price of $110 yet the physical price was $140+.
An issue here is that the physical price isn't easily discoverable. It's hidden behind subscription services that cost thousands so you only hear about it when it's reported on. But this means talking heads are reporting on $110 oil when it's really $150.
We saw a similar mismatch with the silver market at the end of last year. That market too was clearly being manipulated but rather than insiders, many (including myself) suspect it was the refiners and others who had lost with silver's massive rally and were doing everything to pop the bubble, including changing the exchange's liquidity ratios to force sales.
In previous years, some or all of these people would get investigated and prosecuted by the SEC for insider trading. That agency has been defanged by putting a pro-deregulation loyalist in charge but the bigger problem is that some or all of these people will be buying pardons before the president leaves office. And the president can no longer be prosecuted thanks to the Supreme Court inventing presidential immunity.
One source of American power is the control over the global financial system. All of this insider trading risks dismantling that. It's not hard to find people who are sitting out because they simply don't trust anything anymore. If this spreads to financial institutions and institutional traders, that's going to be a big problem.
So-called "prediction markets" (and crypto) are even less regulated than that. Unless you have insider knowledge or you're betting on something that isn't prone to insider information (and I honestly don't know what that would be), I'd stay away.
And these prediction markets are small fry. SPY futures are a significantly larger market. So is oil and gas. And Treasuries is order of magnitudes bigger than either of those. Yet some of those markets can't be trusted and I suspect this is only going to get worse.
I don't have any hope that anyone will ever be prosecuted for any of this.
I don't know how Polymarket works, so maybe you can enlighten me: can Polymarket be subpoenaed to provide the recipients of the payouts? Is there some insulation to keep them ignorant of their identity?
Iran correctly figured out that by threatening the OpenAI data center, where the Kushner family has shares, could move Trump to call off the infrastructure strikes. Or it played a role at least. Maybe the strike is postponed until after the OpenAI IPO.