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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.
This will get regulated eventually. It’s incoherent to apply an entirely different regime to ‘prediction market bets’ than to financial markets, especially when plenty of eg Polymarket markets proxy the regulated securities market (betting on recessions, corporate performance/product, fed policy) as exchanges and others have raised.
There is, like Sloot said, a long history of libertarians and some other people arguing that insider trading should be legal to allow for better price discovery / for market efficiency, that it should be limited only contractually (eg. between employee and employer).
But people instinctually don’t like the idea of insider trading, and so it doesn’t seem coherent to allow it only on Polymarket. The most liquid prediction markets also have a relatively large amount of federally-mandated KYC now, so investigation can’t be substantially harder than for other insider trading.
I think it will happen. Maybe not soon, but eventually. That said, people do get away with insider trading most of the time. There were substantial moves in Israeli securities, in oil, in defense before October 7 for example, presumably because a lot of people knew and those people talked.
This is incorrect. It would be more accurate to say that it is not only incoherent but economically irresponsible to apply an entirely different regime to ‘prediction market bets’ than we do to sportsbooks or any other form of betting.
In the conventual stock market you buy shares of Amazon or US Steel that money is (in theory at least) adding to the capital valuation of that company. That capital valuation then helps finance things like new equipment, payroll, etc... You are paying money to own a "share" of that company, it may be only a 0.000000002 percent share of a billion dollar company, but (again in theory at least) 0.000000002 percent of that billion dollars belongs to you and you can cash out at any time.
Meanwhile "investing" in predication markets is something more akin to "investing" in scratchers tickets. The House has your money regardless and all you are left with is the hope that they might share a portion the money they already took off of others with you.
Insider sports betting isn't illegal, but essentially every sports governing body has rules against the sort of people who might count as insiders betting on their own sport. Sometimes violating these rules involves committing broad-spectrum crimes like mail fraud or wire fraud and there is a criminal investigation into insider sports betting.
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