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Polymarket (for whatever it's worth) currently has OpenAI IPO at only 4% by end June and 40% by end December (and that's even for a small-float IPO as has becom

• throwaway27448 7mo ago
  What is this supposed to imply? You can't reasonably draw any conclusion from betting without understanding who is betting and why. Well, I suppose you can draw the conclusion that "polymarket customers are interested in this topic"
  • smcin 7mo ago
    That Polymarket traders believe an OpenAI IPO this quarter, or even this year, is unlikely (or else almost all of them are hedging, e.g. long on other AI stocks. Which seems unlikely.) Anyone who thinks that position is wrong and it's >4% likely has a clear profit opportunity.
    • edgyquant 7mo ago
      Not everyone is a degenerate gambler
      • some_random 7mo ago
        How many degenerate gamblers do you need before it stops being a useful tool?
  • lelanthran 7mo ago
    > What is this supposed to imply? Wisdom of the crowd, same as guessing jellybeans in a jar. The exact average is wrong, but it's still pretty damn close because the guesses are likely to follow a normal distribution. If the hump of the normal distribution of these guesses is around 4% (or whatever) odds on, the actual answer is unlikely to be far from that. > You can't reasonably draw any conclusion from betting without understanding who is betting and why. Irrelevant; Polymarket is the reflection of the bettors view. When they place their bets, they don't care which way this goes, they only care to predict the direction correctly. Unfortunately, it could be a case of the tail wagging the dog - even if the IPO would have been successful without polymarket existing, now that they have a signal from polymarket it is likely to be used as one of the weightings when they determine the correct time to IPO.
    • WJW 7mo ago
      Wisdom of the crowd has some fatal flaws that are especially important when it comes to things like IPOs. - Most significantly, most scientific research focuses on things that are actually amenable to guesses with a normal distribution, like "amount of jellybeans in a jar" or "length of the border between country A and country B". An IPO is a binary choice where it either goes public or not. There is no correct value to converge to. - It has been shown that as bettors gain more information about the bets of others, predictions lose accuracy and bettors converge to a consensus value instead. It seems to me that online prediction markets would be extremely prone to this as the bets of other people are all there in the market price. - Prediction markets generally become more accurate as the diversity of the bettor pool grows. The users of polymarket and Kalshi heavily skew towards young men from certain socioeconomic groups, who may be biased towards one or the other outcome. In the case of an OpenAI IPO, it seems likely multiple of these would converge as people start to fall prey to groupthink because "everybody knows that they'll IPO soon" in their local media bubble.
      • some_random 7mo ago
        The question isn't "will they IPO" the question is "when will they IPO" which is not a binary question. The rest of your point about Polymarket users now being mostly degenerate gamblers is true though.
        • wat10000 7mo ago
          It’s two binary questions about whether they will IPO by specific dates. It’s not obvious to me that this maps to a more granular “when will they IPO?” question.
        • smcin 7mo ago
          The relative timing, valuations (and float sizes) of the expected SpaceX, Anthropic and then OpenAI IPOs would still be highly correlated. Even allowing for moral degeneracy among most of the gamblers on this particular Polymarket market.
      • jpadkins 7mo ago
  • mcintyre1994 7mo ago
    It only has $1m volume, so even that conclusion is a bit of a stretch. By comparison NCAA tournament has $15m, and US confirms aliens this year has $18m.
  • isoprophlex 7mo ago
    "polymarket customers think they have some alpha over other consumers on this topic" Or even less charitable, "People susceptible to gambling have been manipulated into spending money on this"
  • c7b 7mo ago
    The Venn diagram of people who have deep understanding of capital markets and people who like betting on stuff will have non-negligible overlap. Read some of the stories about Wall Street, especially from before it was all algorithms. Moreover, evidence of apparent insider trading on Polymarket, specifically for OpenAI, has already been shared on HN. Sounds pretty crazy to me to suggest that those odds can't tell us anything about the true probabilities. What's your reasoning?
  • lavezzi 7mo ago
    It’s legalised insider trading. So you can always assume at this point that someone who knows will be cashing out.