I (my agents) have been playing with the kalshi and poly market APIsv and whatever your opinion on the markets themselves it does feel like there's a bunch of interesting things to do with such a firehose of realtime data.
I hope they stay as open and generous as they are now with programmatic access
These apps claim to let you turn your knowledge into money. What this means is the insiders get to cash out and the desperate suckers provide the liquidity. I'm amazed they've all gotten away with this for so long.
I don't understand, what's so fundamentally wrong with this form of insider trading? Is the accusation that it makes degenerate gambling unfair? Is it necessary for degenerate gambling to be fair? The gamblers don't seem to care.
There is a market to bet whether Bryan Johnson will have sex this month or not. I dunno, seems that would be easy to control if you are, I dunno, the living person involved?
I always found interesting that you can bet on Polymarket whether Jesus Christ will come back before 2027 or not.
At the moment, you can bet $96.20 to win $100 that he won't.
The Kalshi-Fox News/CNN deal is the most significant development here. Embedding real-time odds into cable news transforms prediction markets from a niche trading venue into mainstream infrastructure.
The comparison to stock tickers is apt. Bloomberg terminals started as specialized tools for bond traders. Once financial data appeared on every TV screen, it changed how the public understood markets. Prediction markets are following the same path, just compressed into months instead of decades.
The tension is that news organizations now have a financial incentive to cover events that move prediction markets. This creates a feedback loop: dramatic events move markets, market movements become news, news coverage moves markets further. We saw this with the Hormuz situation this month, where prediction market odds were cited in coverage of the shipping blockade, which then moved the odds.
Whether this is good or bad depends on whether you think the signal (real-time probability estimates) outweighs the noise (gamification of serious events). The Forbes incident with the mass shooting market suggests we have not figured out where the line is yet.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 39.4 ms ] threadI hope they stay as open and generous as they are now with programmatic access
https://youtu.be/ZN4njIQcSR4?t=1815
Almost like the offenders get their inside info straight from the chief purveyor of markets up and down chaos
The comparison to stock tickers is apt. Bloomberg terminals started as specialized tools for bond traders. Once financial data appeared on every TV screen, it changed how the public understood markets. Prediction markets are following the same path, just compressed into months instead of decades.
The tension is that news organizations now have a financial incentive to cover events that move prediction markets. This creates a feedback loop: dramatic events move markets, market movements become news, news coverage moves markets further. We saw this with the Hormuz situation this month, where prediction market odds were cited in coverage of the shipping blockade, which then moved the odds.
Whether this is good or bad depends on whether you think the signal (real-time probability estimates) outweighs the noise (gamification of serious events). The Forbes incident with the mass shooting market suggests we have not figured out where the line is yet.