Yet more evidence of the rapid disassembly of the social contract and our collective ethics, aided of course by unregulated tech. If you work for – or are involved in the funding of – these unregulated gambling and insider trading platforms, you should be ashamed of yourself. Your greed and lack of concern for the health of the human world you live in is sickening. You can get bag after bag but it will never fill the void in your soul.
Now of cocourse there are bots circling watching for insider trades. Which you can "milk" by pretending to insider trade and then hedging a bet against them. A whole eco system of scoundrels
That claim is testable. The 2026 microstructure work on the Kalshi tape (72M trades, Becker) documented a systematic +1.12% excess return for liquidity providing makers and a symmetric -1.12% for takers, plus a longshot bias where 1-cent yes shares pay -41% EV and 1-cent no shares pay +23% EV. That edge is in the market microstructure layer. A patient maker who never trades the frontpage market makes money on the marginal bidder asymmetry alone.
Akey, Gregoire, Harvie, Martineau (2026) on Polymarket find that the top 1% of wallets capture about 84% of all profits, and that the largest whale wallets are NOT the most sophisticated. Large capital systematically bleeds expected value to small order traders. Reichenbach and Walther (2025) document within-Polymarket skill persistence at the 124M-trade scale, so skill differentials are measurable across users distinct from the insider trading question.
You'd have to be spectacularly stupid to bet on these kinds of things without having insider knowledge, because you ought to know good and damn well by now that the people with insider knowledge are DEFINITELY betting on them.
Prediction Markets require insider trading to function... how do people not know this? It's a setup from day one. If you have the knowledge, you're going to cash in, if you don't have the knowledge, you are throwing your money away.
I would be careful about attributing all of this to ordinary insider trading. Another plausible explanation is that some activity could come from state linked or intelligence adjacent actors, where the goal is not only profit but also testing or exploiting prediction markets as an auxiliary information channel.
Without them talking about how much people LOST, this entire article is meaningless. With the advent of 0DTE options which dominate options trading, the fact that the notional number of people who made money makes sense because so many more people have lost money.
There’s a recent Patrick Boyle video which puts it aptly: prediction markets are a wealth transfer from retail investors to trading algorithms and people with security clearances.
Anyway, one thing I don’t understand yet is how new markets are created. They aren’t user generated, so how did an “Iran strike” market exist to begin with?
It’s all manipulation and everyone knows it but when the voices are coming from inside the house, who’s going to investigate? If anything every tech company in the whole flow is going to support and add custom flows for them - “to get on their good side”
It's deeply American how so many of these articles about Kalshi or Polymarket frame the issue as something that can be solved on the American end with the stroke of a pen, especially in a multipolar world where American sanctions increasingly fail.
These markets are global with global demand and many of the insiders are on the receiving end of American foreign policy. If an Iranian with a starlink sees a b-2 spirit fly over their house that information will find its way to somebody who will profit from that knowledge, it's just part of the new information economy.
Wait until they find out how many people place perfectly timed horse racing bets on the winning horse, JUST before the start of the race. 100% of them knew to back the winning horse
Say whatever you want about the merits of prediction markets. But I just don't see a way those benefits outweigh the societal dangers of these constant reminders that people in or close to power can freely profit from their positions in the ways the rest of the population can't. There's always talk about the dangers of disincentivizing job creators, but what happens when a society routinely disincentives job havers in this way? We're just getting a constant barrage of information telling us that if we show up to our job and simply work as we're expected that we're stooges who won't get ahead. You'll need to look for your own individual scheme, ethics be damned, if you just want to keep up with the rest of the population. That's not healthy on an individual level or cumulatively at a societal level.
> That's not healthy on an individual level or cumulatively at a societal level.
This is a product of a secular neoliberal culture (certainly including this website) that there is no 'society', really, or at least nothing that's BAD for society - effectively the same thing. If profit is king above all else, there's nothing wrong with vice, with scams, anything to chase the bag. It used to be that neoliberals understood community, but even suggesting that the health of society exists is considered reactionary now.
> You'll need to look for your own individual scheme, ethics be damned.... That's not healthy on an individual level or cumulatively at a societal level.
I was thinking about what you said w/r/t the proximal issue (gambling in prediction markets) and my 1st though was "why is this a big deal? If you're not an insider, just don't participate in these markets ... and then the insiders don't have a counterparty to fleece."
But I thought a little more about and I think you're right. Insider's fleecing others in prediction markets just erodes trust everywhere. And we need a considerable amount of trust in people we don't know for society to function properly.
I don't know the owner at my local hardware store, but I trust that he won't sell me shoddy tools. The same goes for every societal interaction. We need to trust people we don't know. If that gets eroded, we go back a several centuries.
>>You'll need to look for your own individual scheme, ethics be damned
This is remarkably similar to how workers in the Soviet Union got ahead. Your job provided a lot of ways to make money on the side, none of them were beneficial to productivity/trust. I think this kind of reality might just be normal for societies in collapse (also, "gerontocracy")
"Prediction markets" are just scams where insiders trade against suckers. So those who are not insiders should understand that their money will be alleviated by insiders, end of story.
Gambling is a state regulation and Trump has absolutely nothing to do with it other than indirectly through supreme court appointments, but even the 2018 ruling that gave more power to states included votes by two democrat appointed justices - so if you're going to blame trump you also need to blame clinton and obama
How can I evalutate if this is a real issue for cherry picked. Someone won the lotto last week. They must have had insider knowledge! Oh, no, I forgot to look at all the people who didn't pick a winner.
> Sixteen bets made $100,000 each accurately predicting the timing of the US airstrikes against Iran on 27 February
How many bets and for what ammounts were made for other days, or that it wouldn't happen on the 27th?
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 49.3 ms ] threadBecause it won't be prosecuted by 2029 but could be afterwards
Personally I think it's a bigger problem when the President sues his own government for billions and then orders them to pay it out
Because -that- is not an official act. It could be prosecuted but no-one will touch it even after 2029
I predict these will be banned when someone finally uses them as an "assassination market".
Akey, Gregoire, Harvie, Martineau (2026) on Polymarket find that the top 1% of wallets capture about 84% of all profits, and that the largest whale wallets are NOT the most sophisticated. Large capital systematically bleeds expected value to small order traders. Reichenbach and Walther (2025) document within-Polymarket skill persistence at the 124M-trade scale, so skill differentials are measurable across users distinct from the insider trading question.
You need centralized regulation to make it work.
Anyway, one thing I don’t understand yet is how new markets are created. They aren’t user generated, so how did an “Iran strike” market exist to begin with?
Traders place $760M bet on falling oil ahead of Hormuz announcement
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47812385
These markets are global with global demand and many of the insiders are on the receiving end of American foreign policy. If an Iranian with a starlink sees a b-2 spirit fly over their house that information will find its way to somebody who will profit from that knowledge, it's just part of the new information economy.
This is a product of a secular neoliberal culture (certainly including this website) that there is no 'society', really, or at least nothing that's BAD for society - effectively the same thing. If profit is king above all else, there's nothing wrong with vice, with scams, anything to chase the bag. It used to be that neoliberals understood community, but even suggesting that the health of society exists is considered reactionary now.
I was thinking about what you said w/r/t the proximal issue (gambling in prediction markets) and my 1st though was "why is this a big deal? If you're not an insider, just don't participate in these markets ... and then the insiders don't have a counterparty to fleece."
But I thought a little more about and I think you're right. Insider's fleecing others in prediction markets just erodes trust everywhere. And we need a considerable amount of trust in people we don't know for society to function properly.
I don't know the owner at my local hardware store, but I trust that he won't sell me shoddy tools. The same goes for every societal interaction. We need to trust people we don't know. If that gets eroded, we go back a several centuries.
This is remarkably similar to how workers in the Soviet Union got ahead. Your job provided a lot of ways to make money on the side, none of them were beneficial to productivity/trust. I think this kind of reality might just be normal for societies in collapse (also, "gerontocracy")
No it isn't. When this sets in, it becomes insidious and distorts the entire system.
Just one more thing this administration has brought into mainstream.
Nice insider trading scam you have going. Be a shame if something happened to you.
Then defenetrate them.
I guess, how many not perfectly timed bets did traders bet on these things?
> Sixteen bets made $100,000 each accurately predicting the timing of the US airstrikes against Iran on 27 February
How many bets and for what ammounts were made for other days, or that it wouldn't happen on the 27th?