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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.
I think we can separate this into two different questions:
(1) Should prediction markets allow insider trading?
(2) Should people with secret military insider information disclose that information for profit?
The value a prediction market provides is in the odds, banning insider trading would defeat that purpose. In this case, the prediction market providing an accurate image is strongly negatively correlated with the US military achieving its objective.
Two parties having different alignments is not that unusual, it would be the same for journalism and the military, for example. If a reporter is publishing secret military information they learned, they are doing their job. If a soldier is leaking such information to reporters, they are breaking their oath.
The way I would spin this is "a person with insider knowledge was endangering an operation which cost north of 100M$ and the lives of US troops to make a measly half million for themselves". (I am not sure of the timeline there, it is plausible that the bet happened after the capture but before it was announced. Sadly, the BBC seems not to be aware of either the concepts of time zones or hyperlinks (e.g. to the relevant polymarket page).)
While I personally would have liked it if the US operation would have failed as miserably as Putin's attempt to capture the Ukraine government at the start of his special military operation, preferentially with dead and captured US troops (because that is the language the electorate understands, sadly), I imagine the PoV of the US military is different.
In a functioning state, finding the leak would be a top priority. Even if the bet was made after the capture, condoning it would lead to situations where different insiders are competing, which would eventually lead to leaking of military relevant information. I would also predict that the perp was not a career officer, but a political insider. As such, I imagine little will be attempted to find the source.
I am still holding a faint hope that the insider trading will happen again before Trump attacks Columbia, and will lead to my preferred outcome.
Did they ever find out who bought the airline puts before 9-11?
(FWIW, my view remains that the puts were bought by well-connected non-terrorist Saudis with a back channel to Bin Laden, the Bush admin knew this by early 2002, and it was covered up in the 9-11 commission report).
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Let's also keep in mind there's a certain utility function for the US government of having a method to backchannel "reliable" information to the "public" (rival intelligence agencies). Partially for signaling deniably, but perhaps more importantly because you can use it (once) to rugpull anyone at any time.
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