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A prediction market user made $436k betting on Maduro's downfall
- colesantiago 10mo agoInsider trading is legal. Crime is legal. You shouldn't be surprised though, name any market, all markets are full of manipulation and insiders.
- bryanrasmussen 10mo agohey now, Insider trading is legal if you're the right Insider, and so is crime, which means not so much for you and I.
- TiredOfLife 10mo agoIn US shoplifting and car theft are also legal for everyone.
- nradov 10mo agoOnly certain limited forms of insider trading are federal crimes. The insider trading laws don't really cover this type of prediction market. But depending on the facts of the case it's possible that the trader or related parties committed some other crime such as wire fraud or improper release of classified information.
- foxglacier 10mo agoSo what about all the bets for other dates? Who's an insider and who isn't? You're just making up nonsense. https://polymarket.com/event/maduro-out-in-2025 https://polymarket.com/event/maduro-out-in-2025
- giarc 10mo agoSerious question, was there ever another (new) bettor placing $30k on a 6.5% chance outcome?
- tshaddox 10mo agoTo be fair, insider trading for a prediction market doesn’t really seem like a bad thing. It’s arguably the entire point (to incentivize the aggregation of all relevant information on the topic) and, unlike securities markets, there’s no equivalent of “but it’s unfair to normal traders using the markets as investments.”
- bulbar 10mo agoDoes happen any other aggregation than taking the average though? The whole point of this is that the average believe is not an accurate representation of reality.
- ordinaryradical 10mo agoThe problem with prediction markets is not purely insiders but that they interface with the real world, so they encourage bettors not just to predict an outcome but to bring it into being. You are a poorly paid Russian commander. You open an account on polymarket or Kalshi and place a bet about specific Russian troop movements, perhaps ones that would be disastrous to your war effort even, to up the leverage. When you’ve accumulated a sufficient position, you order the troops to be moved, perhaps even out of accord with orders from above. Your front collapses, your soldiers are routed, and you get rich. These markets are dangerous. We will learn this lesson eventually.
- meowkit 10mo agoYour example assumes there would be sufficient liquidity on that bet. The existing platforms aren’t houses or market makers that just provide functionally infinite liquidity on any bets. The “win” criteria on this example is so specific that verification becomes its own problem. In theory a fun example, but practically it doesn’t play out the way you’re describing.
- octoberfranklin 10mo agoThat is called treason, already illegal in every country. We don't need new laws to solve your putative problem.
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- denkmoon 10mo agoI feel like these types of markets exist purely for arbitraging information asymmetry. You have to know what game you're playing.
- N_Lens 10mo agoGeorge Carlin: "You and I are not in the Big Club"
- paulpauper 10mo agoIt's technically not illegal if someone was able to observe the planes flying and place the bets accordingly. Public info is legal to trade on. But it's obviously also ripe for abuse. Any govt. employee can start trading on the side, 100% untraceable.
- giarc 10mo agoThey took off from many different places so you'd have to somehow know that ~150 aircraft were taking off. If you happen to just see one spot, you'd likely just assume it was another bombing of a boat or a dock.
- dbcurtis 10mo agoOr… someone seeing a bunch of commercial flights over the Caribbean getting cancelled. Could be anyone from airline ops to frustrated travelers stranded in Boston.
- giarc 10mo agoI guess... but I still think first thought would be just some more bombing. It's a big step to go from bombing boats, a dock, arresting and extraditing a foreign leader in the middle of the night.
- jasonjmcghee 10mo agoWhat are the laws around polymarket? I've never used it, but continue to see posts about employees making bets on privileged information and that being legal.
- lxgr 10mo agoI highly doubt that that's the case, given that taking a large and publicly visible financial position based on confidential information still amounts to disclosing information.
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- ecommerceguy 10mo agocan i bet on when prediction markets will collapse due to rampant insider bets?
- tptacek 10mo agoInsider bets are literally the purpose of prediction markets.
- giarc 10mo agoHow? Then why would non-insiders bet? The classic prediction market is guessing the weight of an elephant (or some animal) at a circus. The average guess of the crowd will actually get very close. But if someone knows the actual weight, no one would play.
- davidw 10mo agoBecause they are, to use a technical term, "dumb as a stump". That's why they would participate despite not having any inside knowledge.
- mothballed 10mo agoOr they are hedging their exposure to an unknown by betting in favor of an event that would be harmful/costly to them.
- tptacek 10mo agoThose people want prices to accurately track risk, which is what insiders allow.
- mothballed 10mo agoRight but they themselves are non-insiders who are rationally betting.
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- exogeny 10mo agoInsider trading is a feature, not a bug, say Shayne and Tarek, stupidly. You can't have this amount of obvious manipulation and expect the average retail consumer to join. Same reason why there hasn't been mass consumer adoption of crypto. People just don't feel safe.
- tptacek 10mo agoRetail consumers shouldn't be joining.
- bulbar 10mo agoThere has been virtually no adoption at all regarding crypto, except for being a financial product and in that regard it has already been adopted by people. The average consumer is easily manipulated so there's not really a contradiction.
- ralph84 10mo agoEven without insider trading it's a negative-sum game. Every dollar won is a dollar lost, and the platform takes a cut. Like all negative-sum games you should only participate if it's purely for entertainment or you have a clearly definable edge over the other players. If you can't spot the sucker, you are the sucker.
- UncleMeat 10mo agoPeople like to gamble. I expect that the vast majority of interaction with these systems is seen by participants as gambling. "Who will win the presidential election" and "who will win the jets game" are similar kinds of questions. Both are negative sum. And people do get upset and feel cheated when the bet isn't "fair." We just saw a big scandal where various athletes are changing their behavior in order to enable their buddies to win big in sports betting. I really don't think that "well, we should just educate people about the fact that prediction markets are actually battlefields of insider information and their purpose is not to enable gambling on the future but instead to give society some model of future outcomes" is going to stick.
- sadeshmukh 10mo ago
- elil17 10mo agoHow long before the government intentionally does something stupid so that a Prediction Market pays off? Probably won't happen actually, since they can just do blatant insider trading on the stock market instead.
- bulbar 10mo agoAdditionally, they can leverage crypto which is much less regulated and has already been publicly exploited for personal benefit by Musk and Trump. But you don't become a Billionaire by having a risk averse "well, that's enough" mindset. I would think the biggest question is if it's worth exploiting poly market. Getting 400k out of such an event sounds as peanuts and I am not so sure that scales to 4m+.
- kelnos 10mo agoThe money involved in prediction markets at present isn't enough for governments to bother. $436k is a nice windfall for your average individual, but that's peanuts for anyone at a level to influence government actions.
- vintermann 10mo agoThe attitude of powerful politicians to money is more, "if I can get the milk, why should I keep a cow". You don't actually need billions in your bank account, there's not so much you need to spend it on anyway and it's more trouble than it's worth. The real power is in your network. You can move money to where you want it via that - even to yourself in the form of speaking fees, if you should need some change.
- senordevnyc 10mo agoYou should tell this to the current administration. They all seem to be lining their pockets.
- vintermann 10mo agoFair point. It's gotten worse lately. I wonder if it's because of doomerism (not necessarily unjustified): they maybe don't trust their support networks to be around much longer.
- alach11 10mo agoI have to imagine governments are closely monitoring prediction markets as part of their intelligence apparatus. But then you just add another layer of subterfuge. Imagine a D-Day prediction market... "Will the Allies Land in Normandy, Pas-de-Calais, or somewhere else?" The US might buy a major position on Pas-de-Calais the night before as a decoy!
- tehjoker 10mo agoThese prediction markets were proposed by DARPA iirc
- dmbche 10mo agohttps://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/Prediction-Markets-Enhance-Intel.pdf https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/Prediction-Markets-...
- wslh 10mo agoI imagine how few incumbents can take advantage of prediction markets.
- biophysboy 10mo agoHow often are these prediction markets "correct"? Has this been studied?
- janoelze 10mo ago"Correct" is hard to define with prediction markets as likelihood often increases/decreases in the hours before a market is actually called or confirmed. i can't speak for the methodology here, but i remember this data report from a user: https://dune.com/alexmccullough/polymarket-brier-score https://dune.com/alexmccullough/polymarket-brier-score
- enjeyw 10mo agoIt absolutely has been! In general prediction markets can’t be “correct” or “incorrect” - for instance if a prediction market says there’s a 60% chance of an event occurring, and it doesn’t occur, was the market right or wrong? Well it’s hard to say - certainly the market said the event was more likely to occur than not, but only just, and who knows? Maybe the event _only just_ occurred, and very nearly didn’t! So generally we say a prediction market is “correct” if it is “well calibrated”, which is to say that if we took all the events that the market said had a 60% chance of occurring, then approximately 60% percent of these events occurred (with the same holding true for all other percentages). On this note, an interesting phenomenon that used to occur was “favorite-longshot bias”, where markets would consistently overestimate the likelihood of longshot events occurring - so events that the market predicted would occur 10% of the time would only occur 5% of the time. What’s fascinating is that once people realized that this bias exited, they began to exploit it by making bets against longshots, which had the effect of moving the market and removing the biases, making the markets well calibrated. It’s a pretty neat example of the efficient market hypothesis in action!
- kurtis_reed 10mo agoNo, markets are evaluated on accuracy, not calibration
- enjeyw 10mo ago
- paxys 10mo agoJust a casual $32,537 bet a few hours before the secret operation. Nothing to see here.
- mothballed 10mo agoIt's my understanding a couple news agencies knew before everyone else but held off publishing. Seems like a good opportunity for nephew of someone in the media if not directly one of an official. https://www.thewrap.com/media-platforms/journalism/nyt-wapo-knew-venezuela-raid-before-it-happened-delayed-publishing/ https://www.thewrap.com/media-platforms/journalism/nyt-wapo-...
- paxys 10mo agoLet's not forget > Donald Trump Jr, the president's son, serves in advisory roles at Kalshi and Polymarket.
- mothballed 10mo agoAbsolutely possible but if you were the presidents son I do think you'd be more likely to slowly buy in over 1+ weeks. If you were media related you'd want to do a giant bet before anybody else as you know lots of other people know and it's only a matter of time when someone else exploits it, and you only know slightly ahead of time. When you have insider information it's typically most profitable or at the very least less risky to exploit it at the earliest moment, but if you know you have a long head start you can do it slowly to keep from bidding up the price. In either case a giant bet only hour before tells me it's someone who only found out about the operation shortly before it happened. ------- re: below due to throttling ---------- (1) Is an excellent point but they bought "will happen in the month of January" for something that occurred at the beginning of January, so basically the worst case scenario for exploiting bet expiry. (2) Makes sense on face but I had read elsewhere there was a 2 week window. So at no point would it go outside the January window of the bet, there was no point in waiting once January 1st hit. In this case a rational insider with a priori knowledge far ahead of time would have either placed a large bet first thing January 1st or started to ease in first thing on January 1st, as waiting would convey ~no advantage and only present risk other insiders would bite the apple first.
- lisbbb 10mo agoDon't gamble on this crap. Just...don't.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- randyrand 10mo agoUsing 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.
- kqr 10mo agoWell, better synthesis of public information is also a way to win. Some people think of that as more fair. Another way to win is to use them for hedging exposure elsewhere. That also doesn't require inside information.
- randyrand 10mo agoWe are all in the same world. Go find the information you need to make informed choices. Betting on the weather? Go build weather stations. Betting on Kim Kardashian? Go interview her. This "go find valuable information" approach is broadly applicable to making money.
- undeveloper 10mo agopro insider trading is an odd position to defend
- randyrand 10mo agoNo need to limit yourself to "trading". You can use this approach to buy real estate, build products, companies. This private info is often even considered "trade secret", which is protected against being stolen and spread.
- bjackman 10mo agoWhy should we want prediction markets to be fair? I want them to reveal facts about the world. They only need to be fair inasmuch as it serves that goal. I don't think it wouldn serve that goal to forbid insider trading? (Why do we forbid insider trading in the stock market? Not because it's unfair. Because it makes the market worse at doing what we want it to do, which is funding the most productive enterprises).
- p1dda 10mo agoFrom the BBC article: "Insider trading is illegal in the stock market" Not for members of the US Congress.
- watwut 10mo agoI think it genuinely does not matter whether it is legal or not. No one will prosecute them. Legal system was berarely capable of prosecuting rich people crimes and generally unwilling to do so. And the capable parts were dismantled last year. It would take years to rebuild them. And even if they do by some miracle, next republican president will issue pardons like Trump did. This sort of activity is illegal only in theory.
- JasonADrury 10mo agoAt least in the US, you are highly likely to be prosecuted if you engage in any profitable insider trading. Those patterns get automatically flagged and you will be investigated.
- watwut 10mo agoInsider trading was notoriously difficult to prosecute even when the law trying. It involves a lot of grey areas and is not something you can just easily automatically flag. We kind of know it is going on, because people in positions to have insider information are disproportionally "winning" those bets, but that all that goes about it. And current administration removed people and groups capable to handle difficult convoluted white collar cases, so the best bet is that law enforcement will ignore these and will go only after simple low level frauds - because that is all they are competent to do now.
- JasonADrury 10mo agoI don't think this is true. A lot of crime happens, most criminals don't get caught. > It involves a lot of grey areas and is not something you can just easily automatically flag. Successful, high confidence trades by traders who do not make them frequently are trivial to detect statistically. There exist automated systems which detect this. It's extremely difficult to make highly profitable trades based on insider information without making abnormally confident trades. I suppose a big fund that frequently makes high confidence bets based on legitimate, deep, research could theoretically hide such activity, but I don't see that as a ver realistic option. >so the best bet is that law enforcement will ignore these and will go only after simple low level frauds - because that is all they are competent to do now. Insider trading is often one of the simplest white collar crimes to pursue, and it's just good PR because the public always likes it when the feds are going after rich corporate types. The reason it's so simple is because you can automatically get a very high-confidence list of targets who are likely engaged in insider trading, it's also feasible to link many of the traders to insiders in an automated manner using tools like accurint. Even doing this manually makes your life really easy, you start by doing things like checking who each of these individuals follows on social media. A very sophisticated operation could hide this better, but any highly lucrative trades will fundamentally stand out. Any particularly profitable insider trading will be detected and eventually investigated. >We kind of know it is going on, because people in positions to have insider information are disproportionally "winning" those bets, but that all that goes about it. This sentence kind of suggests to me that you might be thinking of some atypical case of insider trading, perhaps involving politicians rather than corporate insiders?
- mellosouls 10mo agoWhere's the evidence for this? Note the lack of links and that all of these Maduro reports originate from X which is rampant with polymarket grifters claiming secret insights into how the big bets are made. Perhaps somebody here can provide a Polymarket link (not screenshots) to the proof? I'm not saying the BBC has been scammed here but the only link I've found to the alleged account 404s. Perhaps its been taken down by Polymarket? Anyway for anybody new to this, even if this checks out please - as ever - be cautious about the claims of easy money.
- ains 10mo agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20260104031407/https://polymarket.com/@0x31a56e9E690c621eD21De08Cb559e9524Cdb8eD9-1766730765984 https://web.archive.org/web/20260104031407/https://polymarke... Looks like Polymarket took the profile down but it’s still available on the Internet Archive
- mellosouls 10mo agoThank you! Should have thought to check the archive myself. The link I'd found before also had a referrer on it from the X account which also made me suspicious.
- mistermaster1 10mo agoThis is such a small amount that either this is one of many accounts the user made in order to mask said activity or this was just a lucky bet (people make stupid lucky bets on hunches all the time). Imagine the massive value of having such a world changing event in advance (the search volume alone probably affected an order of magnitude more in online advertising revenue at least). $430k?! Are you F’ing serious?
- paxys 10mo agoThere were hundreds, maybe thousands of people involved in the operation. They weren't all millionaires. It could have been any random soldier, CIA/DEA agent, politicial aide, journalist or really any low-mid level operative with $30K available to them at the time.
- helle253 10mo agoIt's really hard to understate how brazenly corrupt it all is. These guys arent even trying to hide their tracks anymore, and polymarket/kalshi are well aware of this
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 10mo agoSilicon Valley and other so-called "tech" commpanies, along with "tech journalists" and other online commentators (prognosticators) who presumably work for such companies, are a never-ending source of "predictions" (promises) that never hold true One longstanding example is "vapourware", but the deception carried out today goes even further, IMHO What if the non-believers and realists could use "prediction markets", in addition to short selling, to bet against them Maybe they are already doing so, but I have not seen any examples
- thewileyone 10mo agoThis was probably Barron Trump