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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.
If the feds can get people for rigging poker games, they will find you and catch you doing this if you’re leveraging insider info, even if it’s not a security. But even if they didn’t it’s spiritually bad for you. Lotteries and the like are just a tax on poor people.
I just don’t care if people like Nate Silver make money in gambling markets. It pulls regular people in who lose bad and can’t get out. It is good old fashioned gambling and lucrative bets are out there for every venue. It’s sad to dream of a way out of your middle class life that involves spending the money you do have.
Exactly. I've worked extensively in the industry and made a fair amount of money betting lifetime. Me being able to occasionally find some money bilking operators doesn't really change the fact that the whole thing is built on a gigantic amount of owning essentially defenseless idiots who'd be far better off if they had no exposure to betting.
Even the long-term prognosis for savvy sharp bettors isn't necessarily that rosey. I've seen plenty of cases where somebody started out fine Years 1, 2 and then eventually ran out of edge. Which is especially brutal if they've elected to go full time gambling since then you've got essentially nothing productive on your resume after you've run down your roll. The massive expansion of gambling is a huge social tragedy.
I am also under the impression a lot of large corporate gambling companies will just ban you or restrict how much you can gamble if you are too good. They want to bet against people who will lose, and nothing prevents them from ceasing gambling with people who consistently win!
A lot of it depends on how you go about it. There are some bookies in the world that are faster to converge on a correct/less-wrong price than others, so if a bookmaker sees you're consistently betting times when their prices are 'stale' they will generally kick you out in short order. Which is known as steam chasing since you're essentially arbitraging a faster market move into a slow participant.
Some people (though this is exceedingly rare) can straight up win against the final, most-efficient pricing and they tend to get longer tenures before getting kicked off since it's harder to distinguish that from somebody who's just getting lucky. In either case you'll generally get kicked off before winning any crazy amount of money, and exchanges/prediction markets have historically introduced Premium Charges as well to cull the most-winningest accounts in order to dissuade 100% ROI strategies like insider trading and courtsiding.
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