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For those watching the Presidential election, things have been looking very bad for Kamala lately, with national polls tightening, and Trump ahead in several key states. Although it remains too close to call, Trump's odds have shot up to 57% according to Polymarket.
Harris's 1.4% lead in national polls is cold comfort given that, at a similar point in the election, Biden was up by 9.4% and Clinton was up by 6.7%.
Democratics are panicking about Trump's support in the black community, which has traditionally voted 90/10 in favor of Democrats. While Trump will still lose the black vote by large margins, his style is more appealing to black voters (especially men) then previous Republican candidates like Mitt Romney. Democrats have responded by trying to shame black voters. Recently, Barack Obama was even unearthed to chastise black men for not wanting to vote for Harris.
Enter the latest vote-buying scheme, which I think is the most naked attempt to buy votes I've ever seen in recent US politics, even more than college debt forgiveness.
https://x.com/KamalaHarris/status/1845993766441644386
Harris-Walz have proposed a 20k forgiveable loan for up to 1 million Black (capital B) entrepreneurs to start a business. The fact that the loan is forgiveable means that this is essentially a gift to any grifter who wants to take advantage. But most importantly, it's explicit racial discrimination against the 86% of the country who isn't black.
Personally, I think this appeal is likely to backfire as most swing voters are sick of handouts to people who aren't them.
Will Trump counter with some asinine scheme of his own? Probably.
I can't speak to Polymarket, but I was watching Predictit pretty closely. I saw a surge in market activity about a week ago with Trump moving from $0.49 to $0.56 and Harris dropping from $0.55 to as low as $0.48. I predicted this was a pump-and-dump and that the prices would inevitably settle back to $0.50-ish (there's not really enough volume to to totally wipe the pump, IMO). I missed the $0.48 shares for Harris, but she's back up to $0.51 and Trump is back down to $0.53. Had I taken the Trump short and gotten in at the Harris Lows I could have made $6 for every $100. Not huge, but basically proves my point that these market moves are opportunities for scalping and the race is strictly 50/50...at least for now.
There's a speculative Twitter thread suggesting Polymarket is being distorted by a single huge better: https://x.com/Domahhhh/status/1846597997507092901
Seems possible, but also really stupid unless you think higher odds on Polymarket actually changes the real odds more than trivially.
If the market becomes obviously wrong (like Trump at 85%) then it will attract essentially unlimited money on the other side of the bet that will make it impossible for a single whale to fight.
They say that markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. But that's actually NOT TRUE about prediction markets because they have a concrete end date.
There's still risk discounting to account for. Even if the true odds are, say, 50-50: to counteract 25m of dumb money, the sharp traders need a bankroll in the order of billions of dollars to avoid kelly ruin, i.e. approximately the total volume on that market right now.
True enough. But 1 billion is a tiny amount of the available hot money, which is in the trillions. There's already been a couple billion gambled on this market.
Among high net worth people, there is a huge demand for investments which are both positive alpha and uncorrelated from the stock market. They are rare and precious. Hell, if Trump was at 85% right now, I'd throw in 50k myself.
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