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Prediction markets are breaking the news and becoming their own beat
- ares623 6mo agoI dunno, I feel it's just democratizing insider trading. And as everyone knows, if it has "democratizing" in it, that means it's automatically good.
- Terr_ 6mo agoIn a way, it's even worse. (Yes, I know the post is sardonic, I mean it's even worse than that.) Many of these things are not really democratized either, they're centralized systems with a "we empower you" sales-pitch. The opaque and unaccountable central authority has an incentive to pick-and-choose what's possible, and to put their thumb on the metaphorical scales to get certain outcomes. Kind of like ride-share apps: Any pretense of "democratizing" jobs faded, instead they enabled new flavors of monopolistic exploitation.
- ares623 6mo agoIt's funny, after posting the above message I started thinking what else can be made to sound "good" just by prepending it with "democratizing". Surprisingly it works really well.
- Terr_ 6mo agoProfessor Farnsworth: "Good news, everyone! We're democratizing your health insurance!" Leela: "You mean we can all together vote on the best plan?" Farnsworth: "Hmm? Oh yes, as long as you do it all alone."
- seydor 6mo ago> democratizing insider trading Those are contradictory words
- sixhobbits 6mo agoI (my agents) have been playing with the kalshi and poly market APIsv and whatever your opinion on the markets themselves it does feel like there's a bunch of interesting things to do with such a firehose of realtime data. I hope they stay as open and generous as they are now with programmatic access
- topspin 6mo ago"I hope they stay as open and generous as they are now with programmatic access" Make a prediction for it: When will Gamma/Data/CLOB require subscription: 2026, 2027, etc.
- throwaway0665 6mo agoThese apps claim to let you turn your knowledge into money. What this means is the insiders get to cash out and the desperate suckers provide the liquidity. I'm amazed they've all gotten away with this for so long.
- OJFord 6mo agoThey've 'gotten away with' it by for example winning cases deciding they offer commodities trading, not gambling. (You can disagree with it, it's in the open and explicit is my point.)
- throwaway0665 6mo agoThey've had people in their corner who've overturned state law. There are federal lawsuits in progress.
- OJFord 6mo agoI have no horse in this race, that's sort of exactly my point - they haven't mysteriously 'gotten away with' it like done something illegal and nobody noticed; there have been cases, there will be more, it's so far been allowed. I don't call that 'getting away with' is all.
- charlieyu1 6mo agoI hate the stigma and laws against gambling. They don’t stop gambling, they create a higher barrier of entry leading to monopoly, and gamblers are paying more because lack of competition
- rickydroll 6mo agoThe stigma against gambling exists because of the fallout when the gambler crashes and burns. The primary concern is for the dependents that the gambler is financially responsible for. The second order is the gambler's vulnerability to blackmail. I feel that once a person starts gambling, they've just demonstrated they are not fiscally responsible. There should be a hard stop on increasing debt through loans or credit cards, and any income should go directly to the dependents and not pass through the gambler's hands. Gambling is as destructive as DUI and should be treated with the same level of severity.
- arowthway 6mo agoI don't understand, what's so fundamentally wrong with this form of insider trading? Is the accusation that it makes degenerate gambling unfair? Is it necessary for degenerate gambling to be fair? The gamblers don't seem to care.
- wodenokoto 6mo ago> The gamblers don't seem to care. Which makes me wonder if it is actually just money laundering.
- amwet 6mo agoThe obvious counter example is lotteries. People just like to gamble.
- jessegeens 6mo agoWell, you can also use normal lotteries for money laundering: https://www.ftm.eu/articles/reynders-charged-in-money-laundering-probe https://www.ftm.eu/articles/reynders-charged-in-money-launde...
- yorwba 6mo agoBecause there's pre-existing demand for lottery tickets that provides some plausible deniability for the money-laundering use case. If prediction markets were primarily used to buy insurance against hard-to-avoid expensive events, that's what money launderers would trade in too, in order to blend in. Instead, most volume is in sports bets. People just like to gamble.
- Quarrelsome 6mo agopeople like hope. In Dickens era the hope was that you'd discover you were a long lost bastard child of some wealthy aristocratic family. These days, its that you win the lottery. We shouldn't conflate permitting lotteries which give a lot of people precious hope, with enabling the disease of gambling addiction. Gambling addiction transforms its victims into desperate degenerate messes, who will do anything in order to reverse the outcome of their losses. By popularising gambling on reality (instead of a sandbox like sport) we're creating a future where such people will harass journalists, which further threatens our increasingly precarious relationship with truth.
- DonHopkins 6mo agoI didn't bet on the beat this broke on. https://youtu.be/ZN4njIQcSR4?t=1815 https://youtu.be/ZN4njIQcSR4?t=1815
- Havoc 6mo ago> it blows my mind that we haven’t seen anyone arrested for insider trading yet, Almost like the offenders get their inside info straight from the chief purveyor of markets up and down chaos
- shafyy 6mo agoDonald Trump Jr. is an adviser to both Kalshi and Polymarket, and an investor in one of them (forgot which one).
- camillomiller 6mo agoThere is a market to bet whether Bryan Johnson will have sex this month or not. I dunno, seems that would be easy to control if you are, I dunno, the living person involved?
- podgorniy 6mo agoBuying future becomes even easier: just poor money into a bet and eveyone will discuss it as it's real people's expectations....
- seydor 6mo agoJust Goodhart's law to massive scale, the most predictable thing ever. Please go back to crypto and destroy this abhorrent 'industry'
- shafyy 6mo agoI recommend watching the latest Last Week Tonight about prediction markets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN4njIQcSR4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN4njIQcSR4
- torcete 6mo agoI always found interesting that you can bet on Polymarket whether Jesus Christ will come back before 2027 or not. At the moment, you can bet $96.20 to win $100 that he won't.
- insane_dreamer 6mo agoA good time to rewatch Nightcrawler. Once news is so profitable, the temptation is to create news and cash in on the bets.
- johnleslie_pm 6mo agoThe Kalshi-Fox News/CNN deal is the most significant development here. Embedding real-time odds into cable news transforms prediction markets from a niche trading venue into mainstream infrastructure. The comparison to stock tickers is apt. Bloomberg terminals started as specialized tools for bond traders. Once financial data appeared on every TV screen, it changed how the public understood markets. Prediction markets are following the same path, just compressed into months instead of decades. The tension is that news organizations now have a financial incentive to cover events that move prediction markets. This creates a feedback loop: dramatic events move markets, market movements become news, news coverage moves markets further. We saw this with the Hormuz situation this month, where prediction market odds were cited in coverage of the shipping blockade, which then moved the odds. Whether this is good or bad depends on whether you think the signal (real-time probability estimates) outweighs the noise (gamification of serious events). The Forbes incident with the mass shooting market suggests we have not figured out where the line is yet.