Traders placed over $1B in perfectly timed bets on the Iran war

Posted by trocado 2 days ago

Comments

Comment by slg 2 days ago

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.

Comment by jaredklewis 2 days ago

The current setup does sort of seem like a tax on being stupid. Why would any non-insider participate in these markets? You’re just asking to get screwed.

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.

Comment by lostlogin 2 days ago

> The current setup does sort of seem like a tax on being stupid.

More like a tax on being ethical or having any morality.

Comment by 2 days ago

Comment by throw1234567891 1 day ago

Yeah, if your “virtue” is “not being able to participate”.

Comment by sneak 2 days ago

Nobody is required to participate in these markets.

Comment by naruhodo 2 days ago

Nobody is required to use hacks in competitive multiplayer video games. You may choose to play fairly and be beaten over and over again.

If there are no consequences for the cheaters, it becomes essentially mandatory, and that's without there being money on the line.

Comment by bongripper 2 days ago

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Comment by 2 days ago

Comment by jaredklewis 2 days ago

What is unethical?

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.

Comment by jackyinger 2 days ago

Insider trading is unethical, and has long been recognized as such. It is outrageous for you to suggest that it is a good thing.

It is not a free market if there is insider trading. If insiders are trading other market participants are by definition getting screwed by what was advertised as a fair, impartial system.

You certainly wouldn't participate in a market where you did not think you had fair odds. Tho maybe you're inclined towards the rigging side of things.

Finally, since you're trying to work the information angle, would you care to share any legitimately meaninful information you've gained from prediction markets?

Comment by jaredklewis 2 days ago

> Insider trading is unethical

It is illegal to insider trade in financial markets, which makes sense to me. But financial markets and prediction markets are different; one exists to surface capital, the other information.

Insider trading is forbidden in financial markets because allowing it would be a disincentive to participation by non-insiders, which would be bad because it would reduce the amount of capital the market was able to provide.

In prediction markets, allowing insider trading would be disincentive to participation by non-insiders, which would be a good thing, because the market should surface the most accurate information as possible and insiders have more accurate information than non-insiders.

> and has long been recognized as such.

Prediction markets are in their infancy. They've only really existed for about a decade and even now are tiny compared with markets like commodities or equities. So I don't see how this could have been "long recognized."

> It is outrageous for you to suggest that it is a good thing.

This is not an argument.

> You certainly wouldn't participate in a market where you did not think you had fair odds.

Of course I wouldn't and I wouldn't advise anyone else to do so. But why would we want uninformed people participating in prediction markets? I don't think they should.

What does "fair" even mean here? If Alice is more informed than Bob about X, she'll probably be better at making predictions about X. I guess it is "unfair," but what would the point of a prediction market be if we only allowed uninformed people to participate? Then it's more like a survey of what the average person thinks will happen, which is probably common knowledge, so we don't need a market to find that out.

> Finally, since you're trying to work the information angle, would you care to share any legitimately meaninful information you've gained from prediction markets?

Prediction market odds for elections and important world events are regularly quoted in the press and AFAICT seem to more accurate than pundits and and oped writers at predicting the future. A low bar, but still, if we are going to speculate about the future, we might as well see what actually informed people think.

Comment by jackyinger 2 days ago

What a bunch of fluff.

The problem is that prediction markets are excellent vehicles for corruption as demonstrated by the article discussed here.

You're arguing that corruption is a good thing.

Comment by wallst07 2 days ago

The article is opinionated and sensationalist.

The fact remains that prediction markets and financial markets are not the same thing. Bets between people happened all the time, and you would wager based on information asymmetry, that is the whole point of it.

By making these markets public facing, you get access to this information asymmetry, whereas before it was behind doors, and these bets were already taking place, you just didn't know it, now you do.

Comment by drewgross 1 day ago

The problem with insider trading in prediction markets isn't the "prediction" part, it's the "markets" part. Once there is real money changing hands, then the purpose of the prediction market stops being "surface information" and starts being "make money" (POSIWID sense of purpose). Since the money changing hands is a necessary incentive for the insiders to provide the information, the parts cannot be disentangled and the problem is fundamental.

Note also that prediction markets can't be too different from financial markets because prediction markets are in some sense a generalization of financial markets e.g. you can make a prediction market that predicts the price of some stock on some day.

Comment by 400thecat 2 days ago

I completely agree with you. The only thing I would add is, that prediction markets are not necessarily oracles for predicting the future. They can just as well be used for hedging: imagine, hypothetically I really do not want Trump to win. I can bet on Trump, not because I want or expect him to win, but to hedge my position (perhaps my business would suffer if Trump wins)

Comment by bongripper 2 days ago

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Comment by heavenlyblue 2 days ago

You're conflating insider trading and blatant corruption.

Imagine if a CEO of a company does something that would damage the price of the stock of it's own company, having shorted the stock before? That's not insider trading, that's (probably, I don't know the exact term) fraud and will lead to prison sentence.

Prediction markets enable the policymakers to make these bets. Arguably, there should probably be sorts of limit on who is allowed to be there. But there are still counter examples like Nancy Pelosi who somehow manages to go around these limitations in stock market.

That's whats currently happening.

Comment by blurbleblurble 2 days ago

"Information" is not neutrally reflective of some objective, deterministic reality. Processes involving information are slippery and reflexive, and that's the danger people are all but shouting for you to see. The feedback loops have extreme potential. The danger isn't in "exposing information" it's in people coercing reality to fit their bet. Peoples' lives are on the line.

The wild thing is that prediction market dabbler rationalists who think they're betting on the outcome of a pre-written fiction story are actually just upping the reward for someone to come along and bomb people to death. Your participation is not neutral. You are culpable in the outcome of the situation you're "gambling" on which has not been determined yet and you are literally throwing fuel on the fire. No matter which way you bet it's fuel.

I'm sorry, I don't believe you personally deserve it but for the betterment of the everyone we have no choice but to shame people like you (prediction market rationalizers) via downvotes and hot replies until you can see through the limits of your overly simple model of reality.

I don't think you're a bad or stupid person, but when it comes to your views on prediction markets, they are very bad and very stupid. Thankfully you are not your beliefs and you are free to change them at any time. I beg you to reconsider this one.

Comment by wallst07 2 days ago

This sounds like a poor attempt at attempting to be on the right side of morality through manipulation and shame. There is nothing here that tries to help someone understand your viewpoint.

Let's start of with something simple. Should a single wager between two people be illegal, should sports betting at all be legal? Is it only illegal if one or more entities facilitate the bet?

Comment by blurbleblurble 1 day ago

I didn't say anything about illegality, I'm speaking strictly in terms of the ethics of please stop shitting in the pool shame on you.

Don't poop in the public swimming pool and don't feed perverse war games that result in children and their parents being maimed and killed.

Comment by mint5 2 days ago

Info available to everyone? Yeah nope. That’s like saying the moon is cheese with a straight face.

All anyone knows is that some bloke put money down an hour before the bet resolves.

They don’t know squat about what info those betters have.

Stop telling us the moon is cheese

Comment by mothballed 2 days ago

As a hedge. Say you own real estate in UAE, and you note that insurance does not cover acts of war. Betting on something like "Iran Bombs Dubai" creates some form of real estate insurance for you.

Even if you suppose my example is bad, you should be able to envision some case where such hedge is helpful.

Comment by MadnessASAP 2 days ago

Yes, but the examples where it's good has a name "insurance". It exists, it's generally well regulated, and is not easily exploited.

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.

Comment by wallst07 2 days ago

Nobody would insure this, and if they did, that policy would take months to be written, wouldn't cover the single probability of 1 event, etc...

So you are renaming something that doesn't and won't ever exist.

Comment by MadnessASAP 16 hours ago

And you're trying to rename unregulated gambling as something that is good for society.

Exploiting people with gambling addiction is not a reasonable replacement for insurance.

Comment by amelius 2 days ago

Why not get a real insurance, where it is actually verified that your house was bombed?

Comment by mothballed 2 days ago

I'm not saying it's not out there, but in many cases finding insurance for act of war is difficult. It is certainly rare and almost always far less accessible than using polymarket. If you have a very large holding you can probably get someone to write it for you though.

Comment by crazygringo 2 days ago

Because there are many things where insurance doesn't exist.

Comment by amelius 2 days ago

Ok let's work on that then. But meanwhile, close down unregulated websites like polymarket, where there is no verification of actual damage.

Comment by crazygringo 2 days ago

You can't just "work on that".

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.

Comment by maest 2 days ago

There is a market for custom and rare risk insurance - it's called "surplus lines"

Comment by 2 days ago

Comment by nojito 2 days ago

>Why would any non-insider participate in these markets?

Because they are grossly mis-priced for anyone mildly informed.

Comment by direwolf20 2 days ago

Did you get rich off these markets? If not, how can you say it's true?

Comment by stouset 2 days ago

If this were the case, deeper and more informed pockets than yours would take the opposing position until there’s no more alpha to be had.

Comment by nojito 2 days ago

Not true at all.

A great example was this market from the most recent primary election.

https://kalshi.com/markets/kxtxsenatedemturnout/voter-turnou...

Based on just simple math there was basically no chance of turnout being over 2.5m and yet the market for multiple days had the higher buckets at exorbitant prices.

Comment by wallst07 2 days ago

The turnaround was 2.3m, I don't get your point. Texas doesn't require party affiliation.

Comment by nojito 1 day ago

Correct and the higher brackets above 2.5m were at 50-70 cents each.

Comment by direwolf20 2 days ago

> Why would any non-insider participate in these markets? You’re just asking to get screwed.

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.

Comment by stouset 2 days ago

Mind explaining to the class how you know how to make the same bet as the insiders without actually having insider information?

Comment by colechristensen 2 days ago

I think the bigger risk is changing major decisions (like war) based on the profitability of bets. Forget about drone war doctrine, if you're an adversary just place absurdly large bets which incentivize the opposition to do what you want. (i.e. bet so you "lose" the bet when the enemy changes their posture to gain the profit).

Politics is already full of these pay to play incentives but now anyone with enough cash can influence world events.

Comment by SJMG 2 days ago

This kind of nation-level hedging has been talked about for years in betting market-aware communities. It's honestly a much better use than fleecing nobodies with insider knowledge.

Comment by stubish 2 days ago

We should be more worried about who placed the losing bets then. Russia, Israel and China having a market for government and military officials to accept their bribes is kind of a bigger story than insiders fleecing gamblers.

Comment by H8crilA 2 days ago

The oil trade structure actually does make sense, because this is how you buy oil, or really any commodity that takes so much space and weight. You order it ahead of time, then if you hold till the contract settles you are allowed to pick it up from the place and in the way designated in the contract specification. In fact you are obliged to pick it up, that's why prices can go negative in exceptional situations. Prediction markets are then just a clean cash-only derivative.

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.

Comment by slg 2 days ago

>The oil trade structure actually does make sense, because this is how you buy oil, or really any commodity that takes so much space and weight. You order it ahead of time, then if you hold till the contract settles you are allowed to pick it up from the place and in the way designated in the contract specification. In fact you are obliged to pick it up, that's why prices can go negative in exceptional situations. Prediction markets are then just a clean cash-only derivative.

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.

Comment by nine_k 2 days ago

The point is that's a dubious derivative of a market that makes sense.

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.

Comment by Tade0 2 days ago

Airlines in particular prefer to have a predictable price of fuel, whatever it might be, so they buy futures.

Comment by lesuorac 2 days ago

Do they? Afaik, they don't [1].

> 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...

Comment by Tade0 2 days ago

That's the US. Meanwhile in Europe the practice is alive and well:

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2026/03/25/ryanair-to-ho...

> European carriers have hedged about 80 per cent of the fuel they need for this year and typically take out new hedges on a rolling basis to lock in future prices.

Comment by wallst07 2 days ago

Almost every very large company that relies on commodities will have a treasury desk whose sole purpose is to work with future markets, its very common practice. It doesn't matter if one npr article has a anecdote, it exists.

Comment by lesuorac 2 days ago

"Almost"? Can you can name 1 with evidence?

Like if I look up home depot they talk about price volatility and that's the exact opposite of what a hedge produces. I'm honestly starting to doubt if they hedge at all; like why bother using Wall Street as an intermediary and just talk to your suppliers.

> [1] This was another historic quarter for lumber price volatility. During the first few weeks of the second quarter, prices for both framing and panel lumber reached all-time highs before quickly falling from their peaks. As an example, during the second quarter, framing lumber peaked at approximately $1,500 per thousand board feet before falling over $1,000 to approximately $500. While pricing for both framing and panel has come down from the peaks, the average price during the second quarter was still significantly higher than the same period last year. Inflation from core commodity categories positively impacted our average ticket growth by approximately 420 basis points during the second quarter.

[1]: 2021 Q2 - https://ir.homedepot.com/financial-reports/quarterly-earning...

Comment by slg 2 days ago

Is there a name for the phenomenon of when someone provides a single explanation that is so inconsequential that it ends up being counterproductive because surely they would have given a better explanation if one existed?

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.

Comment by fyredge 2 days ago

That still does not satisfactorily answer the question though, why don't they just sign a purchase order with N month lead time? That still gives a well defined price ahead of time.

Comment by nine_k 2 days ago

But that's literally what a "future" is.

Comment by strulovich 2 days ago

The people who need the constant price do that, but creating this contract generates an investment at the same time. The person promising the price is taking a premium to take the risk, they can the sell that risk in a free market.

Comment by direwolf20 2 days ago

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Comment by tyre 2 days ago

are you saying that the people trading on inside information about military operations are… producers hedging exposure?

Comment by busyant 2 days ago

> 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.

Comment by jfil 1 day ago

>>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")

Comment by munksbeer 18 hours ago

> That's not healthy on an individual level or cumulatively at a societal level.

No it isn't. When this sets in, it becomes insidious and distorts the entire system.

Comment by airstrike 2 days ago

> Say whatever you want about the merits of prediction markets

Go on, I'll wait for those "merits"

Comment by boringg 2 days ago

Lining the pockets of the vcs who funded them and the other insiders. Nothing but an extractionary industry with no underlying benefit.

Comment by austhrow743 2 days ago

More accurate information about the world allows for more effective decision making.

Comment by airstrike 2 days ago

If people are insider trading so blatantly, there's no "more accurate information" here until it's too late and it's already news. You're just getting scammed

Comment by austhrow743 1 day ago

What do you mean "it's already news"? As in it's already happened?

I don't understand why insider trading would only happen as something becomes news. The inside knowledge haver is risking the information leaking some other way before they make their bet. Some very risk averse insider traders (lol?) may do so, but others are going to make their bets when they learn their information.

Assuming that they don't though, and every insider trader only ever makes their bets right before an event, I don't see how that changes anything? People working with non-insider knowledge are still going to be betting against each other before that point. They are still going to establish a likelihood of a thing happening that's more accurate than I would by myself.

The potential for scamming is high at low dollar figures sure. At some point of volume though, it's going to become too expensive to do.

Comment by airstrike 23 hours ago

I'm not saying insider trading would happen only as something becomes news. I'm saying you, as the outsider, doesn't find anything out until very close to the prediction materializing. That information provided to you by the insider comes very close to the event happening, because that's how the insider minimizes the risk that the event unfolds differently from their bet.

> People working with non-insider knowledge are still going to be betting against each other before that point. They are still going to establish a likelihood of a thing happening that's more accurate than I would by myself.

How is this useful information at all? Other than to sate your curiosity and undiagnosed gambling problem.

Price discovery in capital markets is useful because, well, there is no other way to discover price. By definition, the price of an asset is what someone is willing to pay for it.

Event discovery in prediction markets is throwing your money away hoping you guessed right, despite the fact that the biggest markets have insiders who are always going to outperform you. It's a sucker's game.

Comment by wallst07 2 days ago

The hole point of a prediction market is to surface insider trading and information asymmetry by voting with what matters most [in trading markets], money.

In other terms, it allows people to transfer risk to money , or information for money.

Comment by airstrike 2 days ago

No, that is not the point of a prediction market, though many people have been led to believe as much.

Comment by TZubiri 2 days ago

As a foreigner, some view making business with the US as shady in of itself. I usually stand by the US legal system, (which even american citizens might find laughable), but this is by far the most likely reason I would distance myself from doing business.

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.

Comment by luxuryballs 2 days ago

what you’re describing kind of sounds like the wild west or the settlers frontier or the Industrial Revolution, all things that were actually quite beneficial, however in our current environment where everything has been regulated and captured by corporate lobbied legal machinery it’s much worse to have heavy restriction on the masses with the monied upper class able to grease the wheels, if we’re going to have the freedom we need to boom a healthy economy for everyone we need far more wild west from top to bottom

Comment by hashstring 2 days ago

Well said.

Comment by easterncalculus 2 days ago

> 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.

Comment by Buttons840 2 days ago

[flagged]

Comment by beaviskhan 2 days ago

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.

Comment by 3eb7988a1663 2 days ago

Even if you are not "betting" similar trades are happening in the stock market as well. Large movements in oil futures shortly before policy changes are announced.

Comment by janalsncm 2 days ago

Insider trading is at least regulated in the stock market, albeit imperfectly. Imagine how much worse it would be if C-levels could just short their own stock during a board meeting. No one without insider knowledge would touch it.

Comment by troyastorino 2 days ago

Matt Levine often says something like "insider trading is not about fairness, it's about theft." The problem isn't that it's less fair to some stock traders than others, and that stock trading should be some form of perfect gambling where everyone has an equal chance of success. Stock trading is inherently about exploiting information asymmetries — that is what all "non-insiders" are trying to do. But insider trading is wrong because it's effectively stealing confidential information from the company & shareholders, which is in violation of & conflict with the fiduciary responsibility that board members, executives, and employees generally have towards shareholders.

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.

Comment by wallst07 2 days ago

Yes, 100%, it is information asymmetry. It happens in every "market" in the world.

The goal should be to balance the information asymmetry, not burry it.

Government officials using their power to affect war decisions ought to be a crime on it's own, not surfacing the information to the public through a prediction market.

Comment by janalsncm 2 days ago

This was my thought. If these markets continue allowing insiders, it’ll drive all of the cash from regular people away. So there will be way less money for insiders to win even if they are allowed.

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.

Comment by a2128 2 days ago

I think the market could adapt if regular people left. Insider trading would become multilayered and complex. Insiders would scheme against lower-level insiders; decisionmakers would try to trick insiders into thinking that one thing will happen before doing the complete opposite thing. The world would become more erratic and unpredictable, even insiders wouldn't know what is going on.

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...

Comment by janalsncm 1 day ago

The problem is that the number of people who have any sort of “insider” (material non public) info at all is orders of magnitude lower than the number of people who are well-versed in material public info. And not all insiders are going to place bets.

Kalshi and poly market are going after mass market appeal which is why they buy Super Bowl ads.

Comment by crazygringo 2 days ago

I mean, the thing is, insiders will disagree. Nobody has a crystal ball to predict the future perfectly.

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.

Comment by zarzavat 2 days ago

That's not how insider trading works though.

Let's say that you know that event Y is going to be announced that will make event X more likely. Before Y is announced you buy shares in X on a prediction market or buy some asset that has price correlated with X. After the announcement you liquidate your position and pocket the difference.

Whether X actually happens or not is irrelevant to you. All that's relevant is the timing of the announcement of Y and the directional effect of Y on X.

Comment by lostlogin 2 days ago

> If these markets continue allowing insiders

What are the chances of large bets being made by anyone who isn’t an insider?

Comment by stouset 2 days ago

> it’ll drive all of the cash from regular people away

Sweet summer child…

It is widely accepted that this is happening. Dumb money continues to be poured into these markets.

Comment by stubish 2 days ago

A bet against an event is win/win if you want that event to occur. If you are a country that wanted the US to strike Iran, placing a large number of bets that they won't either gets you what you want or earns you money. It is one reason why you can't bet on someone being murdered, as it creates a deniable market to crowd source assassination. Strange that you can crowd source war, but not assassination.

Comment by strulovich 2 days ago

You also have to be quite stupid to do it with insider knowledge. A bunch of them have been caught in Israel.

Being indicted for treason and treason like charges sounds worse than the SEC coming after you.

Comment by bluecalm 2 days ago

Same goes for sport betting and yet here we are. People like to bet. They willingly bet on things they have guaranteed disadvantage on (casino games like roulette, slots etc.). People also drink pure poison (alcohol), smoke pure poison (cigarettes) and engage in brain dead activities like speeding and street racing.

Gambling should be judged as any other vice - people get something out of it (rush, hope, whatever) not by rational money allocation standards.

Comment by agumonkey 2 days ago

considering the scale involved, and the OSINT trend, is it possible that people could monitor and correlate stuff like airplane, or us navy activity to deduce when to enter ?

Comment by nathancahill 2 days ago

I saw a tweet about a trader placing an oil bet when they saw two military aircraft turn around on their way to Iran, via transponder. I believe before the deal was announced.

Comment by 3eb7988a1663 2 days ago

That also sounds easy enough to fake for some plausible deniability.

Comment by yellow_postit 2 days ago

Just as parallel construction [1] is used by law enforcement to conceal methods and practices no reason to not expect the same for financial gain.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

Comment by wallst07 2 days ago

Traders have been using satellite images from around the world for DECADES, it seems more likely to be true than a conspiracy from a insider who actually makes the decision or has first line access to it.

Comment by 3eb7988a1663 1 day ago

If I have access to expensive real-time satellite imagery, I am not blasting my insights on Twitter.

Comment by huorricannes 2 days ago

in fact US army publicly admitting running a disinformation campaign involving flying planes knowing they would be seen by osint in the previous Iran attack from last summer

Comment by stefan_ 2 days ago

Do you buy oil or products made with it? Then sorry, you made a bet, and in fact you were just ripped off by your own government for the third time in a row.

This is not a "crypto prediction market" problem.

Comment by crazygringo 2 days ago

And this is the whole point.

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.

Comment by ndsipa_pomu 2 days ago

If the prediction markets are supposed to have insider trading, then they should be made illegal.

Comment by paulpauper 2 days ago

couldn't you somehow in theory track the order book to if and when insiders are betting and then copy the trade?

Comment by georgemcbay 2 days ago

For prediction markets you can find out who the insiders are for different categories over time, see for example:

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.

Comment by andrepd 2 days ago

Not knowing who are the insiders and who is the dumb flow is like the fundamental problem of hft

Comment by iknowSFR 2 days ago

You can trade on non-public information if you obtain that information unintentionally. Now you have to be able to prove it’s unintentional if the question came up. A real experience example of this is if you work in an office building and your neighboring company, a public company, is being raided by the FBI. Can you use that information to take a position in the market? Yes, according to multiple attorneys we spoke with.

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?

Comment by huorricannes 2 days ago

intentionally/unintentionally is not relevant.

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

Comment by JumpCrisscross 2 days ago

> you can even be a regular employer of a public company and trade based on information sent on internal emails

You absolutely cannot.

Comment by Supermancho 2 days ago

"cannot" here meaning it's likely to be prosecuted, not that you cannot. You absolutely can.

Comment by anonymars 2 days ago

This interpretation is incredibly unlikely. The first and third paragraphs discuss legality, but the middle one was merely talking about likelihood of prosecution?

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

Comment by Supermancho 2 days ago

To be clear, I was responding about trading on internal communications, not specifically a raid. The practice of using internal communication to guide trading runs contrary to most company policies. I happen to have worked at a company where this kind of practice was both acknowledged and openly discussed. It was a strange place.

> 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.

Comment by anonymars 2 days ago

Looks like you're one of today's lucky 10,000* to learn that insider trading is very much illegal!

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.

* https://m.xkcd.com/1053/

Comment by JumpCrisscross 2 days ago

> If someone is routinely making $20k–$30k transactions, that alone is unlikely to trigger scrutiny

If they never make money, you’re fine. If they make a lot of money, it will get flagged ex post facto. Regulators then check if you or your family have any affiliations with the issuer; if they do, it’s flagged further. All of this typically happens automatically after companies’ stock prices move significantly.

Comment by 2 days ago

Comment by 3eb7988a1663 2 days ago

How is there enough volume to cover the other side of the bet with these minutes-before trades?

Comment by andrepd 2 days ago

The oil market is, to put it mildly, fucking huge

Comment by JumpCrisscross 2 days ago

> oil market is, to put it mildly, fucking huge

Sure. But these aren't trades in "the oil market." They're bets on Polymarket and a specific oil-futures exchange.

Comment by OutOfHere 2 days ago

Are you implying that there is arbitrage between the prediction market and the real market? Until now we were assuming that the prediction market is self-contained, with its other side staying within the confines of the prediction market.

Comment by huorricannes 2 days ago

the other side can and many times is an arbitrageour which has positions in both the prediction market and the real market

Comment by 3eb7988a1663 2 days ago

For sure, the real trading markets are huge. I mean the betting platforms.

Comment by huorricannes 2 days ago

the betting markets offset positions with the real markets. it's all connected

Comment by JumpCrisscross 2 days ago

> betting markets offset positions with the real markets

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.

Comment by 2 days ago

Comment by paulpauper 2 days ago

insiders would presumably be bigger trades that show high conviction about improbable events. An insider would wait until the last minute to take advantage of low prices of a market close to expiration.

Comment by cout 2 days ago

In theory that is part of what was supposed to have been solved by CAT.

Comment by phrygian 2 days ago

What is CAT?

Comment by aaron695 2 days ago

[dead]

Comment by socalgal2 2 days ago

Apparently, according to you, lots of people are spectularly stupid because the only way you make money in a prediction market is for someone to bet on the opposing view point.

Comment by jagged-chisel 2 days ago

And how else would one make money in a prediction market? The winner isn't paid from the ether; money doesn't just materialize to pay the winner.

Comment by outlore 2 days ago

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?

Comment by 1659447091 2 days ago

> 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

Comment by cwillu 2 days ago

https://help.polymarket.com/en/articles/13364541-how-are-mar...

Users absolutely can propose markets

Comment by Terr_ 2 days ago

Also: Nascent exchanges for paying someone to commit violent or illegal acts.

Comment by reactordev 2 days ago

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.

Comment by TZubiri 2 days ago

The theory would be that the people without information pay for knowledge. Or to hedge against certain events.

Similarly to how people would pay premium over inusrance

Comment by reactordev 1 day ago

that is what they sold you... that is not the theory.

Comment by UncleMeat 2 days ago

I've never seen an ad from either Kalshi or Polymarket that says "don't play if you aren't an insider."

Comment by jjav 2 days ago

The game only works if they also have a lot of people losing money.

Comment by b0Ringmth 2 days ago

[flagged]

Comment by firebot 2 days ago

Most gamblers prescribe to the cost sunk fallacy and keep 'one more time'ing it to bankruptcy.

Math wins over your feels every time.

Comment by OutOfHere 2 days ago

If you follow your math, such gambling losers don't really have that much money to bet on an ongoing basis. The ones who support the losing side on prediction markets are the ones who usually do fine, but sometimes are taken by surprise.

Comment by bigfatkitten 2 days ago

Problem gamblers routinely take out loans, mortgage major assets, max out credit cards, and steal from their employers to fund their habits.

Comment by casey2 2 days ago

Statcon 101: Gambling addicts take loans to gamble, those loans are sold to your pension fund. Who is the loser?

Comment by stouset 2 days ago

Out of curiosity, are you aware of the existence of Las Vegas, Nevada?

Comment by nojito 2 days ago

>Prediction Markets require insider trading to function.

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.

Comment by stouset 2 days ago

> making a very good side income

If you had a reliable edge, your income would be exponential. Why isn’t it?

Comment by ShinTakuya 2 days ago

Do you need a reliable edge or just a slightly better than average edge?

Comment by stouset 1 day ago

[dead]

Comment by nojito 1 day ago

The markets I participate in tend to be illiquid, but as prediction markets get more popular things are getting better on that front.

Comment by DANmode 2 days ago

potentially, each time.

Comment by mr_00ff00 2 days ago

> But traders weren’t just active on Polymarket: there were similar surges of oil futures trading activity just hours before Trump announced updates to the conflict that would lower oil prices.

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...

Comment by reenorap 2 days ago

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.

Comment by jfrbfbreudh 2 days ago

Yes, someone is on the other side of the losing trade, but how many people (not firms) do you know who write contracts for short term options?

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)

Comment by watwut 2 days ago

Of course they made money from other traders. But that is precisedly the issue with insider trading - you are taking money from more honest traders.

Comment by Stevvo 2 days ago

These articles always focus on "Yes" bets. An insider betting "No" might get by completely unnoticed.

Comment by ck2 2 days ago

What's the statute of limitations on such things?

Because 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

Comment by cheschire 2 days ago

Doesn’t matter. They’ll be pre-pardoned.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/5829203-presidential...

Comment by TZubiri 2 days ago

War crimes probably have their own statute of limitations.

Comment by cbg0 2 days ago

Unless somebody snitches there's no real way to prosecute insider trading. You can say you just felt like making a trade, or that you read one of Trump's posts the moment he put it up on Truth Social and you just happened to have the trade ready to go.

Unless they're absolute morons, the people doing insider trading for large sums of money will have already built a strong alibi.

Comment by oa335 2 days ago

> Unless they're absolute morons, the people doing insider trading for large sums of money will have already built a strong alibi.

My theory is they are banking on preemptive presidential pardons in Dec 2028.

Comment by Noaidi 2 days ago

Trump already said he will do this.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-plans-to-pardo...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

Comment by JumpCrisscross 2 days ago

Keep in mind that preëmptive pardons have not been upheld by the courts [1].

[1] https://www.criminallawlibraryblog.com/preemptive-pardons-co...

Comment by throwaway902984 2 days ago

If that reached the supreme court however, precedent sadly might not matter too much.

Comment by JumpCrisscross 2 days ago

> Unless somebody snitches there's no real way to prosecute insider trading. You can say you just felt like making a trade

If you have perfect opsec, sure, you'll just waste a few years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in court. If you texted a friend, or told a friend who then texted a friend, or traded too soon after receiving privileged information, you're probably fucked.

> Unless they're absolute morons

At least in securities, the dirty secret is most insider traders are in Congress and/or morons.

Comment by ZeroGravitas 2 days ago

In some nations just gambling on a war that your soldiers have died in would ruin people's careers and possibly their lives permanently as they are shunned by society.

In other nations you can illegally sell arms to Iran in order to illegally evade congress's attempts to stop you supplying money to terrorists, illegally shred evidence and lie to congress under oath about it all and get a job as a pundit on Fox News.

Comment by paulpauper 2 days ago

you can say you just felt like making a trade, or that you read one of Trump's posts the moment he put it up on Truth Social and you just happened to have the trade ready to go.

An employee with access to Truth Social's backend can in theory do this by reading the tweets he's writing before he sends them.

Comment by bdcravens 2 days ago

I'm not convinced there won't be someone with a chip on their shoulder eager to snitch. Trump has been known to leave folks out to dry once they're used up (for example, Ruby Giuliani and Mike Lindell). Just today there's been discussion about how Kash Patel feels like he's on the chopping block:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47813001

Comment by SwellJoe 2 days ago

Given Trump has promised blanket pardons for any illegality from his administration during his term, I think the question will be whether pardons for crimes not yet investigated/charged are covered by the pardon and whether anyone will pursue those investigations and convictions.

Democrats have historically not really been willing to do anything if there's any plausible sounding reason for doing nothing, so I'm guessing they'll jump at the opportunity to wave away the insider trading stuff. Let bygones be bygones, you know, in the spirit of bipartisanship and comity. They slow-rolled prosecuting the crimes of the first Trump administration. So slow that he was re-elected before anything began to happen.

Comment by Bud 2 days ago

[dead]

Comment by heywoods 2 days ago

I think it’s fair to say the trajectory of all of this leads to bad actors creating the events and making decisions on policy that guarantees outcomes that they have conveniently made bets on. https://www.copingwithfootnotes.com/p/the-commodification-of...

Comment by tsoukase 2 days ago

The gamblers are obviously close to top government politicians, either relatives, friends or straw men. The corruption is escalated in levels the US have never seen. It used to be more covered and punishable but now it's happening in front of naked eyes.

Comment by elAhmo 2 days ago

It’s not perfectly timed bets, it’s called insider trading.

Just one more thing this administration has brought into mainstream.

Comment by andreygrehov 2 days ago

[flagged]

Comment by 93po 2 days ago

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

Comment by whamlastxmas 1 day ago

Lmao at pure facts getting downvoted

Comment by ckemere 2 days ago

Why can’t the markets just forbid transactions that happen within 48 hours of resolution?

Comment by low_tech_love 2 days ago

Because the markets don’t “forbid” anything, especially when they are profiting from it, which polymarket definitely is. It’s the government who must forbid things for the good of the citizens. But somehow the citizens were dumb enough to fall for the bullshit idea that you should put the same person who is profiting in charge of regulating their own crimes!

Comment by gleenn 2 days ago

What does that solve? Wouldn't the insiders in e.g. the Iran War just have to place their bets 3 days before?

Comment by footydude 2 days ago

> in e.g. the Iran War just have to place their bets 3 days before?

It certainly wouldn't perfectly solve things but the further out a prediction is made the more risk there is that the outcome could change - even for someone with insider knowledge.

E.g. I've worked in businesses where an M&A has looked a nail on cert - as part of a small discreet team involved we were being readied for the announcement etc. only for it to stumble a few days before completion.

Obviously there are some markets/situations where a few extra days won't make a difference at all, but I could see how something like that would introduce more risk/uncertainty for those with insider knowledge.

Comment by ninjahawk1 2 days ago

In my opinion the entire prediction market is simply a way to legalize insider trading and war profiteering.

Comment by yalogin 2 days ago

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”

Comment by le-mark 2 days ago

There’s something deeply wrong with the executive branch controlling law enforcement and who gets prosecuted in the US. Jack Smith had him dead to rights in two cases (read the indictments they are water tight) that his attorney general then dismissed. It’s a travesty. Thank you “let the courts handle it” McConnel.

Comment by hdhdhsjsbdh 2 days ago

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.

Comment by arjie 2 days ago

The biggest sums involved appear to be on the oil futures market. That market has existed for a long time (half a century to a century depending on the sophistication you measure). If this is is a novel occurrence it cannot be the platform that 'caused' it.

I think it's just that we create useful tools: futures, the pre-emptive pardon, and so on. Then people figure out how to use those tools to enrich themselves in ways we did not anticipate. It's just a question of how we fix our machinery in this cat and mouse game or if it is fixable at all.

Comment by cyanydeez 2 days ago

Isn't it more than the ability to manipulate global markets essentially means we're headed towards a global inflation crisis? No one with critical thinking skills believe Elon's valuations are a rational market concern.

But if they _are_ rational, eg, a zimbawean inflation nightmare, then if you're not trying to "escape the permanent underclass" then _you_ are the irrational person.

So ignoring all politics, we're really dealing with a zeitgeist of people who think wealth inequality is endless, and the only way to survive is to lobster bucket and YOLO every chance to gamble.

Comment by thot_experiment 2 days ago

This applies to almost everyone working on SaaS; not in all cases, but the absolute majority work on SaaS means creating artificial scarcity in order to extract value from people. It is a fundamentally evil, antisocial, anti human thing to do. If you believe that is okay to restrict access to infinite resources to preserve the status quo you deserve the same place in hell as the people pushing gambling.

Don't create artificial scarcity. Don't play zero sum games.

Comment by shigawire 2 days ago

> almost everyone working on SaaS; not in all cases, but the absolute majority work on SaaS means creating artificial scarcity in order to extract value from people.

Maybe this is just my lack of understanding in how most SaaS companies operate... But to me making software that people find valuable and charging them for that is not inherently immoral. Surely that is the majority of cases?

Comment by tredre3 2 days ago

People like thot_experiment don't believe in intellectual property, period.

They believe that everything that is created should be public domain when the cost of replicating it is zero (books, media, software, music, most art). Those people also generally believe that borders and countries shouldn't exist.

Whilst I respect their worldview, I have found that it's not worth arguing with this group because they typically refuse to explain how such world would work, handwaving away any problems you'll bring up.

Comment by thot_experiment 2 days ago

I actually care only about one specific thing here.

Do you believe it is moral to restrict access to something that is effectively infinite?

Comment by com2kid 2 days ago

> This applies to almost everyone working on SaaS;

The original idea behind SaaS is to align the incentives of the customers and the software company.

Historically software companies made money on selling upgrades. This meant bug fixes were not a priority, and security fixes were something companies got shamed into doing.

SaaS fixes that incentive problem. With reliable ongoing revenue a company can keep software patched and updated and doesn't have to cram a bunch of new shiny marketable features in just to make a huge sale every 3 or 4 years, while engineers try and add whatever bug fixes they can after the shiny new features have been polished off.

It also means software companies don't have boom or bust cycles with hiring. Funding stays consistent, and so does staffing. It makes the financials much easier to manage. Companies used to hire a bunch of temp employees in the run up to a release.

Ongoing release cycles also led to better software engineering practices. More automated tests, reproducible builds, better version control systems, and a lot more things that we take for granted now days.

There are obvious downsides to SaaS as well, but the original idea was good.

Comment by Noaidi 2 days ago

> Don't create artificial scarcity.

Nah. You know what the answer is? Get to a mental and physical state where you need very little. Right now the only way to win is not to play.

Comment by throwaway132448 2 days ago

This is pseudo-intellectual drivel. Creating value and then charging for it is not creating “artificial scarcity”, any more than doing nothing is creating “artificial scarcity” by absence of value. There was no “infinite resource” that just happened to exist before the work was put in to create it. And creating value is - almost by definition - completely orthogonal to zero sum games.

Comment by thot_experiment 2 days ago

What are you talking about, most SaaS could be software that just runs on a computer, it's SaaS because you need a way to retain control to charge for it. Most of the effort going into developing software this way goes into the part that holds onto the value because distributed systems are hard. A lot of software is drastically easier to create if you don't turn it into SaaS. In any case I don't think SaaS companies don't create value, but I think the cost for that value is too high.

Comment by cmwelsh 2 days ago

I’ve never heard “intellectual property” phrased as “artificial scarcity” and it isn’t exactly wrong…

Comment by CPLX 2 days ago

This is the only reasonable point of view to take on the widespread and obviously unethical outbreak of gambling platforms. The fact that it's downboated and towards the bottom is just a reflection of how far the discourse has fallen.

Granted, maybe I should be less surprised given the fact that this is all being posted on the promotional website of a technology-focused private equity fund, but it's disappointing nonetheless.

Comment by paulpauper 2 days ago

Insider trading exists with stocks too. I mean, if there is a way for people to profit by bending the rules or information asymmetry, someone will find a way.

Comment by ChrisArchitect 2 days ago

Traders place $760M bet on falling oil ahead of Hormuz announcement

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47812385

Comment by blondie9x 2 days ago

We all know the president and those close to him are making these bets. The question is are lawmakers willing to collectively take action to stop this practice?

Comment by 2 days ago

Comment by lifter3101 2 days ago

Why wouldn’t the platforms require the identity of people cashing out more than, let’s say, $10k a year to be public? Or at least, require KYC level trail to cash out so it can be investigated later.

It protects 99% of people who want to have fun by losing money and prevents insider trading at no virtually no cost.

Comment by jmyeet 2 days ago

At some point this kind of insider trading will end up hurting any supposed "integrity" of the markets. This sort of thing is meant to be actively prosecuted, even if that didn't always happen or didn't always succeed.

This is an open kleptocracy now. Nobody will be punished for any of this. Any regulatory authorities have had milquetoast deregulatory sycophants put in charge of them. The powers of those agencies have been consistently eroded by a Supreme Court of radical ideologues.

That same court completely invented presidential immunity out of thin air for the person who appointed 6 of them. That president will continue actively selling pardons. If he's not involved in these trades, he'll sell pardons to those who are. And the president himself is free from any consequences. You might be tempted to say "impeachment". I chortle.

A lot of poeople misunderstand the source of the power of the American dollar. They then go on to say nonsensical things like "trading oil in [other currency] will destroy the petrodollar". No. Oil is traded in dollars because of the demand for dollars, not the other way around. What underpins the strength of the US dollar is the US military.

That US military has been humiliated in Iran and really hasn't won a conflict since 1945 (not countin Grenada). This latest war has alienated current allies. If this continues, I can honestly see people looking for an alternative where whoever controls the currency will actually maintain the integrity of the market by prosecuting this kind of kleptocracy.

Comment by mrtksn 2 days ago

I wonder if this means that in a true free market betting is actually impossible as extra-gaming structures like those spontaneously emerge.

You need centralized regulation to make it work.

Comment by mananaysiempre 2 days ago

The standard argument for prediction markets does not include any kind of fairness in gambling. Rather, the point is precisely to surface insider or otherwise well-founded knowledge of the real odds so they can be available to anyone who wishes to look at the price.

(And I do not see how this first-order viewpoint is problematic, precisely. It’s the second-order consequences of people making the currently-considered-unlikely decision in order to cash in on a bet that I have an issue with.)

Comment by rapjr9 1 day ago

Perhaps these trades are the result of a national security compromise. The current administration has reducing spending on cybersecurity, so perhaps Trump's own phone has been compromised and a foreign country is using the information to profit from the information. Something like this has happened before:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/06/trump-p...

Would be ironic if Iran was getting funding this way.

Comment by doctorpangloss 2 days ago

According to the Guardian, clicking around on some websites.

I guess, how many not perfectly timed bets did traders bet on these things?

Comment by Garlef 2 days ago

Other than casinos, prediction markets have no incentive to punish cheaters

Comment by wslh 2 days ago

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.

Comment by iambateman 2 days ago

Occam would disagree.

Comment by OutOfHere 2 days ago

The most Occam-safe explanation is not insider trading but actually hard work in analytics to rapidly surface intelligence from X and other alternative data sources.

Comment by huorricannes 2 days ago

occam doesn't work in financial markets.

because if it did you would print money by following occam.

Comment by iambateman 1 day ago

But it does work in conspiracy theories which is what we have here.

Comment by wslh 2 days ago

[dead]

Comment by echelon 2 days ago

What value do prediction markets give to anyone not in the insider trading class?

I predict these will be banned when someone finally uses them as an "assassination market".

Comment by jamal-kumar 2 days ago

Government leaders and political policy advisors, intelligence agencies, hedge funds & quants, and large corporations doing crowdsourced forecasting for sure. That's probably why they haven't just been made illegal - the very policy makers are utilizing the data streams from this to predict the near-future to a decent degree. Companies like Cultivate Labs [1] go into the maths of it all but if you prefer videos Hypermind has some good ones [2] - anyone thinking this is just some degenerate gambler thing and criticizing them on those terms likely has no idea that people are doing pretty serious quantitative analysis on these things, to which use I will leave to your imagination

[1] https://www.cultivatelabs.com/crowdsourced-forecasting-guide

[2] https://www.hypermind.com/master-class

Comment by tenahu 2 days ago

Thanks for the links, very interesting.

Comment by jamal-kumar 2 days ago

It's pretty much the same math behind weather prediction. Very roughly speaking, they have models to rank predictors (Or say, weather forecasting models) on accuracy and then figure out where the best predictors are all agreeing and the worst predictors are all saying the opposite of those best predictors.

It's worth noting that these prediction markets just run on blockchains, so pretty much anyone with the mathematical and technical knowhow can analyze those data streams and do much better than your average degenerate gambler who has no idea what they're getting into

Key is reconstructing the historical data from the smart contracts that run these things, that's a bit of a challenge but last I checked there's some companies which have figured this out [1]

[1] https://www.probalytics.io

Comment by SirMaster 2 days ago

I thought the point of them is they are “truth machines” they give a financial incentive for the insider class to essentially share what they know.

The benefit to those outside the insider class are that we now have a better idea of the potential outcome.

Comment by dvt 2 days ago

This is what their argument is, and personally I think it's a pretty good one. But the main issue is that retail is getting fleeced and lives are being destroyed by gambling, so non-professional investors should not be able to use it. Imo, the upside (some fisherman with insider knowledge betting on the Strait of Hormuz) doesn't outweight the downside (a large-scale societal gambling epidemic[1]).

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/inside-out-outside-i...

Comment by jamal-kumar 2 days ago

I think it's worth noting that my bank lets me ruin my own life too if I want with their own trading platform

Comment by avaer 2 days ago

What are they sharing that they know though? That someone's getting bombed in an hour? That the government is rampant with corruption?

The first seems arguably treasonous. And the latter seems directly supported and funded by these "prediction markets".

If the argument is that prediction markets are truth machines, their social function seems to be support crime on a massive scale and get away with it.

Comment by bostik 2 days ago

Well, that's the entire point.

If we take a completely utilitarian and amoral viewpoint, the insiders are selling their material, non-public information. The rest of the market participants are buying. From the latter's utilitarian perspective the former are providing a valuable service and getting paid for it. I'm pretty sure there was a legal term for such sales activity...

The only people playing fair are those who don't know how to cheat well enough.

Comment by low_tech_love 2 days ago

How can anyone differentiate an insider bet from a normal one enough to actually make use of it?

Comment by SirMaster 2 days ago

I think the premise is that the betting market prediction odds should be more accurate than other sources of statistics because of the underlying financial incentive.

Comment by paulpauper 2 days ago

Anyone can profit from an information asymmetry or mispriced markets--not just insiders with connections. If you are willing do do enough research you can in theory gain such an advantage. This is what some hedge funds do.

Comment by dvt 2 days ago

Afaik, Polymarket removes predictions that break CFTC's regulations (this includes assassinations, etc., at least in the US). They basically provide no value unless you're an insider, but they do tend to be leading indicators so it might inform some decisions (like: should you keep your money in oil?) that could be contingent on Polymarket predictions.

Comment by shpx 2 days ago

If I'm reading the order book correctly, right now you can "win" $474,746 on Polymarket with a $4,000 bet if Trump "ceases to be the President" by April 30

https://polymarket.com/event/trump-out-as-president-by-april...

which is effectively an assassination market on him. And there other such crowd-sourced hits on other heads of state.

Comment by 2 days ago

Comment by dogtorwoof 2 days ago

I would argue that the sole value of prediction markets is to make insider knowledge accessible to the general public, quicker than it normally would.

That’s why these platforms saying things like “we will roll out insider trading” is laughable.

Comment by operatingthetan 2 days ago

>I would argue that their sole value is to make insider knowledge accessible quicker to the general public.

Is anyone using AI to track these audacious and large bets? Seems like you could actually do this to tell which ones are insider info and which are just stupid random bets?

Comment by OutOfHere 2 days ago

I would just count which side of the bet has more bets above the median bet size with a zero or near-zero bet history. Insiders are more likely to use throwaway accounts than are non-insiders. Spoofers may however deter such analysis. AI may not strictly be needed for analysis.

Comment by operatingthetan 2 days ago

I haven't actually used the platforms except looking at betting odds for elections. Do they give any tools for looking at past results and analyzing?

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Comment by OutOfHere 2 days ago

Just because an insider bets on something does not in any way make the bet obvious to onlookers until the event is materialized for all to see. There is absolutely no surfacing of intelligence here because big bets are on both sides, winning and losing.

Comment by rickydroll 2 days ago

Somebody should these track these people down, and say to them:

Nice insider trading scam you have going. Be a shame if something happened to you.

Then defenetrate them.

Comment by cineticdaffodil 2 days ago

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

Comment by artificialprint 2 days ago

You don't get it, you can make m o n e y with it, with which you can buy a yacht and an expensive car.

Comment by paulpauper 2 days ago

and then spoofing. Creating fake trades to entice copycats.

Comment by mmooss 2 days ago

These are clearly leaks and probably violate other laws. If the Trump administration actually cared, they would pursue them.

They aggressively pursue other leaks, including searching journalists' property.

Comment by diego_moita 2 days ago

This story isn't new. Several sports were famous for corruption caused by bets: box, soccer, bicycle racing, etc.

The result is always a loss of credibility. With time, only the dumbest keep betting.

Comment by Spooky23 2 days ago

“Traders” it’s not the word I would use. Maybe traitors.

Comment by tezza 2 days ago

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

Comment by sieste 2 days ago

Maybe a superhuman AI? /s

Comment by smetannik 2 days ago

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Comment by _the_inflator 2 days ago

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Comment by kasey_junk 2 days ago

These headlines always irritate me because they use notional value for sensationalism. The 950m notional is if they were paying for a price move of the whole thing from $0 in cash. But these are highly levered futures contracts. And you are getting in and out at 2 price differences that are close to each other.

It’s still shocking corruption and absolutely should be enraging. But that’s because it’s a 10s of millions dollar trade. Not a billion dollar one.

Comment by djoldman 2 days ago

100%.

They might as well quote the Quadrillions changing hands in the OTC derivative package markets.

Comment by hereme888 2 days ago

Good for those who made the money. I would have done so had I had such insider info, as long as it didn't compromise any operation.

Comment by egonschiele 2 days ago

Do you not think that that would have a negative impact on the world? or do you not care, or is this "the world is going to hell so I may as well get mine"?

Comment by hereme888 2 days ago

It's an unregulated world of gambling. Like trading DogeCoin. If you had insider knowledge, it was/is legal to trade there as you want.

Comment by egonschiele 2 days ago

Ah okay, so it's a case of "it's legal so it's fine", and impact or principles don't come into it.

Comment by hereme888 2 days ago

Um, yes. If I were certain of a price movement before others, I'd take advantage, and so would you. But you can virtue signal with fake empathy if you'd like.

Comment by low_tech_love 2 days ago

As long as the hordes of losers are not bothered by it enough to ask for fairness in the business, you’re right. Ethics and morals are constructs with the intention of creating a better, more just common existence. If the people in this common existence don’t care, then there is no reason for them not to do it.

Comment by Bud 2 days ago

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Comment by socalgal2 2 days ago

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?

Comment by dublinstats 2 days ago

Yes I would have liked to see some more intelligent analysis and statistical justification. This article is just outrage-bait for common consumption.

Comment by int32_64 2 days ago

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.

Comment by JumpCrisscross 2 days ago

> especially in a multipolar world where American sanctions increasingly fail

You're claiming the U.S. government is impotent against holding Polymarket to account?

> These markets are global

The trades in question are bets on Polymarket and Intercontinental Exchange Brent oil futures. These are well within the remit of American law enforcement.

Comment by int32_64 2 days ago

>You're claiming the U.S. government is impotent against holding Polymarket to account?

Yes, if US regulators quash Polymarket their lunch will be eaten by a global competitor HQ'd in a country the US can't touch.

A lot of the insider weekend trading of oil is happening on hyperliquid, a DEX associated with developers in Singapore, what can the SEC or CFTC do to them?

Comment by Mtinie 2 days ago

Why would the U.S. government want to sabotage prediction markets when the chief executive has a vested interest in keeping them legitimate?

Comment by JumpCrisscross 2 days ago

> Why would the U.S. government want to sabotage prediction markets when the chief executive has a vested interest in keeping them legitimate?

"Solving" the problem of administration juniors compromising our military for profit doesn't require sabotaging anything. Just the exchanges turning over records.

Comment by bigbugbag 2 days ago

you may have missed that all those have been happening for months and are tightly tied to the trump administration ?

same administration who has a son sitting on the board and a father president who has lifted all sanctions and investigations.

we even have video of representatives placing their bets or buying stock during session, right before voting on the matter.