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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.
There's a market commentator who talks about silly stories in finance, Matt Levine. If you enjoy finance get on his mailing list and you get free columns.
One of the things I've learned from him is US insider trading laws aren't there to make markets fair (the whole point of markets is to spread information). They're punishing taking misappropriation of information the trader had a duty to keep for someone else.
Yes this still probably violates that second point, too. It does reinforce the quotes comments point.
From Google Ai "Insider trading laws exist primarily to ensure fairness, maintain market integrity, and protect public trust by preventing individuals with privileged, nonpublic information from gaining an unfair advantage over regular investors, which promotes a level playing field and encourages broad participation in capital markets. These laws uphold transparency, ensuring all investors have access to the same information, thereby preventing market manipulation and fostering confidence in the financial system's reliability and honesty. "
"misappropriation of information" is one of many reasons
Thanks for your AI slop that's also completely wrong.
why not just read the SEC website
https://www.sec.gov/news/speech/speecharchive/1998/spch221.htm
it says right here
"Our markets are a success precisely because they enjoy the world's highest level of confidence. Investors put their capital to work – and put their fortunes at risk – because they trust that the marketplace is honest. They know that our securities laws require free, fair, and open transactions."
fairness is a stated reason from the SEC itself.
I think the OP had a different argument in his mind. It would be like saying that Patriot Act is about being patriotic because government website said so, or that Inflation Reduction Act is about reducing inflation by ballooning government deficit, which predictably failed to no surprise for anybody, including those who proposed it.
There are real world actions that actually show that fairness is not necessarily the primary value. For instance stocks charge exorbitant money for earlier access to their data or for co-location with their servers in order for customers to reap benefits of high frequency trading scalping regular trader joes. If fairness was their goal, they would take steps in order to reduce such practices - but then they would lose revenue on level of $60 billion a year and increasing rapidly.
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