Posted by trocado 7 hours ago
Though it’s not that different from the stock market, where the folks at WSB happily give their money to Citadel, Jane Street, and friends, because every once a while, one of them hits it big after going all in that the ball lands on green.
Gambling is a hell of a drug and there are good reasons why it is illegal in so many places. Prediction markets have some good externalities (information), but it’s another addictive outlet for those vulnerable to gambling addiction.
More like a tax on being ethical or having any morality.
The good point of prediction markets is that they provide information. This information is available to everyone, for free, which benefits everyone.
Insiders help achieve this. Insiders have information and by participating in the market they then expose and share that information. So this is good. If we ban insiders, we're just banning accurate information from getting into the market. If we do that, we might as well just ban prediction markets altogether. I don't have a strong opinion either way on that, but a prediction market without insiders is pointless.
Because they are grossly mis-priced for anyone mildly informed.
Even if you suppose my example is bad, you should be able to envision some case where such hedge is helpful.
The reason it works better is because in a prediction market, the person betting against you has no resources or ability to go after you for fraudulent behavior. Whereas an insurance company has both.
Insurance works on repeatable, predictable risks based on models.
You can't get insurance against a military attack. But you can hedge using a prediction market. It's essentially the version of insurance for one-off events, that relies on wagers since you can't use models.
If people who do the obvious trades (sell oil right now - it's going down) lose money, all you have to do is do the opposite (buy oil right now - it's going down) and gain money. Is it not that simple? You will profit along with the insiders when Trump blockades the strait again, although you won't have such perfect timing.
Most of the other prediction markets seems rather stupid to me (they are completely detached from any real world activity), other than their prices being a fairly reliable source of information for bystanders.
You just described what is happening, you didn't actually provide any reason for why this is good for anyone but the individuals profiting from it.
As usual, it's a tax on naive and those who get addicted; the twist is that they are willing to pay it, demand and beg to pay it, so providers spring up, legal or not.
> WONG: However, Gerry says most of the major airlines in the U.S. eventually soured on fuel hedging. One reason - the Wall Street transaction fees to make these hedges got expensive.
> WOODS: Plus, Gerry says the airlines found that they could make money the old-fashioned way by raising prices. Today, none of the major airlines in the U.S. are hedging.
Hedging is one of those things that sounds cool but then when your service is x% more expensive than a competitor and you lose customers you just stop doing it. It's kinda like being on AWS; when everybody has an outage together nobody asks "oh what can be done differently".
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2026/03/27/nx-s1-5759203/fuel-hedging-on...
If your go-to reasoning for why we need prediction markets is so airlines can have more predictability in their fuel costs, you're inadvertently making a solid argument that we don't actually need prediction markets. And this isn't even getting into the other ways these airlines could satisfy the same need.
Politics is already full of these pay to play incentives but now anyone with enough cash can influence world events.
Go on, I'll wait for those "merits"
It helps that some states are bringing criminal charges vs these companies. But it looks like a no contest as to how we'll look back to these kinds of things in 5 years.
Betting on war is war, you may argue that it's an individual's right to participate in war, (I don't think so, I think that it's a war crime for unmarked civilians to participate in war), but funding bellicose action is war.
So the perception of insiders is pretty bad for prediction markets as a business imo.
The sooner they knock off the rhetoric about the “theory” behind prediction markets and start thinking about it like a business, the sooner they will take insiders seriously.
Although Polymarket is currently spending a lot of money trying to market itself to working-class regular people to get hooked and scam their paychecks out of[0]
[0] https://nypost.com/2026/02/12/us-news/nyc-gets-its-first-fre...
Military operations go awry. Countries react in unexpected ways. Leaders change their minds.
And as a potential event gets closer, insider information changes. Different insiders have different sets of partial knowledge.
You don't even need scheming and tricking. Just regular reality is already complicated enough.
What are the chances of large bets being made by anyone who isn’t an insider?
Conceptually, I think that is the right analogy to think about. Prediction markets "want" to be a more accurate source of information, just like stock markets, so from that lens "getting" information to be more accurate is good. When government officials are placing bets on prediction markets, though, it's a massive violation of operational security, and leaking confidential information. They probably think that they are acting anonymously, but it creates so many opportunities for unfriendly state actors to get information, especially if people do it consistently.
Being indicted for treason and treason like charges sounds worse than the SEC coming after you.
Prediction markets are supposed to be providing the most accurate predictions.
The most accurate predictions come from insider information.
Poeple complaining about insider trading on prediction markets seem to be missing the point. They're supposed to have insider trading. That's the whole idea.
This is not a "crypto prediction market" problem.
Gambling should be judged as any other vice - people get something out of it (rush, hope, whatever) not by rational money allocation standards.
I bring this up because we assume the trading is coming from insiders but I wonder if the parties behind this have baked in a layer similar to my story above.
To close this back to your comment, and I don’t have an answer here: is knowing who the insiders are and acting on that a crime? If you did know and didn’t report them, are you breaking a law? Or worse, you reported it to the deaf ears of a regulator that are focused elsewhere or are under resourced to respond now?
it's legal to follow FBI cars and see who they raid so as to make trades. you could even have a hedge fund specialized on this. it's called alternative data
you can even be a regular employer of a public company and trade based on information sent on internal emails.
the only thing illegal is to be a designated insider - typically a restricted group of people with access to sensitive information
You absolutely cannot.
Even then it would be inaccurate: the regulators are not too stupid to put two and two together that you work for a company and got incredibly lucky with your trade
> the regulators are not too stupid to put two and two together that you work for a company and got incredibly lucky with your trade
You’re implying some specific combination of factors, but it’s not clear what you mean. What qualifies as "timing"? Around earnings, when trading volume is highest or just around some event? And what exactly counts as "lucky"?
Why would regulators scrutinize a sub-$25k purchase of my own company’s stock? That concern feels overstated. Granted, I’m not a lawyer. In practice I can place a trade at any time. If someone is routinely making $20k–$30k transactions, that alone is unlikely to trigger scrutiny.
The claim that you "absolutely cannot do this" is simply incorrect. I stand by that.
Here's a few examples: https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/insidertrading/cases.shtml
Some further advice on the matter: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-08-12/the-10-la...
10 Laws of Insider Trading
1. Don’t do it.
2. Don’t do it by buying short-dated out-of-the-money call options on merger targets.
3. Don’t text or email about it.
4. Don’t do it in your mother’s account.
5. Don’t do it by planting bombs at a company and shorting its stock.
6. Don’t do it while employed at the Securities and Exchange Commission.
7. Don’t Google “how to insider trade without getting caught” before doing it.
8. If you didn’t insider trade, don’t forget and accidentally confess to insider trading.
9. If you are going to insider trade, do it in a company that is far away from a Securities and Exchange Commission office. Like, physically.
10. If you are already under a federal ethics investigation about your ownership or promotion of a stock, don’t insider trade that stock.
Sure. But these aren't trades in "the oil market." They're bets on Polymarket and a specific oil-futures exchange.
Need a strong source for this. The size (and regulatory) disconnect between the two would seem to make making markets in both a bit silly.
https://x.com/peterjliu/status/2024901585806225723
But there is still the problem of knowing which new trades the insiders made before the bet is settled (maybe solved by being an insider of the prediction market), and also since prediction markets need money on both sides (you are betting against other people, not the 'house') when the insiders make their buy they probably eat up most of or all of the action on the other side.
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?
Having the US presidents kids as multimillion dollar investors in the platforms and on the advisory board of one them would be a good place to look
Users absolutely can propose markets
Math wins over your feels every time.
Prediction markets are all the buzz, but banning them isn’t fixing the problem. This has happened forever. Let’s not forget there was an unusual amount of put option buying right before 9/11: https://ideas.repec.org/a/ucp/jnlbus/v79y2006i4p1703-1726.ht...
Similarly to how people would pay premium over inusrance
Stephen Miller and Charlie Kirk were pretty clear their sides whole philosophy is take and never give back. They learned it was OK not from their parents but gen pop sitting on their hands.
The entire economy is Las Vegas now; only the (white) house wins
And yet there are folks like me who have been on them for years before kalshi/polymarket making a very good side income from them without having insider knowledge.
Prediction markets as a whole are very very inefficient. That's not to say that insider trading doesn't exist but you can't claim that they require insider trading to function.
I personally don’t know any, and I worked at one of the biggest HFT firms for a few years.
The losing side(s) of these positions are heavily hedged, and are happily making money on volume and volatility. (And making record profits this year)
It protects 99% of people who want to have fun by losing money and prevents insider trading at no virtually no cost.