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This story went viral A prediction market user made $436k betting on Maduro's downfall.
In the comments, one thing I have observed is the willingness of people to defend insider trading. Here is the highest-upvoted comment on Hackr News:
"Using insider information is how you are supposed to win these. Otherwise it's just random gambling. This is not the stock market. There are no public reporting rules for the weather, song lyrics, what Kim Kardashian eats tomorrow."
Does this sound insane to anyone else? Why isn't everyone doing this, if they aren't already? Just create a market about things you know in advance, using proxies and crypto mixers to hide your identity and money trail if needed. An Nvidia employee could make a prediction market about an upcoming chip, or an Apple employee about an upcoming iPhone. More specifically, shill accounts would create markets pretending to be an outsider, and the employee and his accomplices would place the correct bets leading up to the deadline. Wash trades by accomplices could be placed to create hype and volume to lure unsuspecting traders.
My comments of course were downvoted. They always are. I could make a comment along the lines of the "Pizza tastes great" and I would be downvoted by every pizza hater on that site and no upvotes by everyone else who enjoys pizza, as is the counterintuitive nature of online voting patterns. Writing good comments is an art in and of itself.
The fundamental question seems to be whether prediction markets are basically gambling or basically banking. For prediction markets to work at scale, they have to be on the gambling side. The question is whether people's innate risk-aversion leads them to treating it more like banking, which ruins the point of a prediction market in the first place.
The whole point of a prediction market is that people with inside knowledge will exploit it, thus leading to shifts in the odds line, thus leading to that insider information being communicated to all of us, anonymously through the price signal.
I think this is broadly true, but "inside knowledge" is a bit of a spectrum here. Trading on classified "inside" information: probably too far. Betting on someone's death because you're a nurse that saw their chart? Probably also too far. Note that both of these are potentially crimes separate from the betting, though.
Even in the corporate world, there is a line between presumed insiders in management, regular employees (who can trade generally, but not in specific situations), and someone on the outside who just knows a specific market domain much better than the average investor. And it sounds like commodities is even a bit looser still (outside of onion futures).
I'm not sure where I'd put the line, but I don't think I'd ask for complete openness. Sports betting, especially on intra-game details, seems particularly prone to rigging, and we've seen criminal charges files within the last few months that IMO don't feel unreasonable. I see wanting efficient pricing of probabilities, but it seems like we should agree on what the priors for those probabilities are.
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