Discussion
Traders placed over $1bn in perfectly timed bets on the Iran war. What is going on?
beaviskhan: You'd have to be spectacularly stupid to bet on these kinds of things without having insider knowledge, because you ought to know good and damn well by now that the people with insider knowledge are DEFINITELY betting on them.
paulpauper: couldn't you somehow in theory track the order book to if and when insiders are betting and then copy the trade?
ck2: What's the statute of limitations on such things?Because it won't be prosecuted by 2029 but could be afterwardsPersonally I think it's a bigger problem when the President sues his own government for billions and then orders them to pay it outBecause -that- is not an official act. It could be prosecuted but no-one will touch it even after 2029
cbg0: Unless somebody snitches there's no real way to prosecute insider trading. You can say you just felt like making a trade, or that you read one of Trump's posts the moment he put it up on Truth Social and you just happened to have the trade ready to go.Unless they're absolute morons, the people doing insider trading for large sums of money will have already built a strong alibi.
oa335: > Unless they're absolute morons, the people doing insider trading for large sums of money will have already built a strong alibi.My theory is they are banking on preemptive presidential pardons in Dec 2028.
echelon: What value do prediction markets give to anyone not in the insider trading class?I predict these will be banned when someone finally uses them as an "assassination market".
dvt: Afaik, Polymarket removes predictions that break CFTC's regulations (this includes assassinations, etc., at least in the US). They basically provide no value unless you're an insider, but they do tend to be leading indicators so it might inform some decisions (like: should you keep your money in oil?) that could be contingent on Polymarket predictions.
dogtorwoof: I would argue that the sole value of prediction markets is to make insider knowledge accessible to the general public, quicker than it normally would.That’s why these platforms saying things like “we will roll out insider trading” is laughable.
operatingthetan: >I would argue that their sole value is to make insider knowledge accessible quicker to the general public.Is anyone using AI to track these audacious and large bets? Seems like you could actually do this to tell which ones are insider info and which are just stupid random bets?
3eb7988a1663: Even if you are not "betting" similar trades are happening in the stock market as well. Large movements in oil futures shortly before policy changes are announced.
reenorap: Without them talking about how much people LOST, this entire article is meaningless. With the advent of 0DTE options which dominate options trading, the fact that the notional number of people who made money makes sense because so many more people have lost money.
wslh: I would be careful about attributing all of this to ordinary insider trading. Another plausible explanation is that some activity could come from state linked or intelligence adjacent actors, where the goal is not only profit but also testing or exploiting prediction markets as an auxiliary information channel.
iambateman: Occam would disagree.
hdhdhsjsbdh: Yet more evidence of the rapid disassembly of the social contract and our collective ethics, aided of course by unregulated tech. If you work for – or are involved in the funding of – these unregulated gambling and insider trading platforms, you should be ashamed of yourself. Your greed and lack of concern for the health of the human world you live in is sickening. You can get bag after bag but it will never fill the void in your soul.
thot_experiment: This applies to almost everyone working on SaaS; not in all cases, but the absolute majority work on SaaS means creating artificial scarcity in order to extract value from people. It is a fundamentally evil, antisocial, anti human thing to do. If you believe that is okay to restrict access to infinite resources to preserve the status quo you deserve the same place in hell as the people pushing gambling.Don't create artificial scarcity. Don't play zero sum games.
throwaway132448: This is pseudo-intellectual drivel. Creating value and then charging for it is not creating “artificial scarcity”, any more than doing nothing is creating “artificial scarcity” by absence of value. There was no “infinite resource” that just happened to exist before the work was put in to create it. And creating value is - almost by definition - completely orthogonal to zero sum games.
reactordev: Prediction Markets require insider trading to function... how do people not know this? It's a setup from day one. If you have the knowledge, you're going to cash in, if you don't have the knowledge, you are throwing your money away.
DANmode: potentially, each time.
CPLX: This is the only reasonable point of view to take on the widespread and obviously unethical outbreak of gambling platforms. The fact that it's downboated and towards the bottom is just a reflection of how far the discourse has fallen.Granted, maybe I should be less surprised given the fact that this is all being posted on the promotional website of a technology-focused private equity fund, but it's disappointing nonetheless.
SirMaster: I thought the point of them is they are “truth machines” they give a financial incentive for the insider class to essentially share what they know.The benefit to those outside the insider class are that we now have a better idea of the potential outcome.
dvt: This is what their argument is, and personally I think it's a pretty good one. But the main issue is that retail is getting fleeced and lives are being destroyed by gambling, so non-professional investors should not be able to use it. Imo, the upside (some fisherman with insider knowledge betting on the Strait of Hormuz) doesn't outweight the downside (a large-scale societal gambling epidemic[1]).[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/inside-out-outside-i...
avaer: What are they sharing that they know though? That someone's getting bombed in an hour? That the government is rampant with corruption?The first seems arguably treasonous. And the latter seems directly supported and funded by these "prediction markets".If the argument is that prediction markets are truth machines, their social function seems to be support crime on a massive scale and get away with it.
OutOfHere: I would just count which side of the bet has more bets above the median bet size with a zero or near-zero bet history. Insiders are more likely to use throwaway accounts than are non-insiders. Spoofers may however deter such analysis. AI may not strictly be needed for analysis.
outlore: There’s a recent Patrick Boyle video which puts it aptly: prediction markets are a wealth transfer from retail investors to trading algorithms and people with security clearances.Anyway, one thing I don’t understand yet is how new markets are created. They aren’t user generated, so how did an “Iran strike” market exist to begin with?
firebot: Most gamblers prescribe to the cost sunk fallacy and keep 'one more time'ing it to bankruptcy.Math wins over your feels every time.
OutOfHere: If you follow your math, such gambling losers don't really have that much money to bet on an ongoing basis. The ones who support the losing side on prediction markets are the ones who usually do fine, but sometimes are taken by surprise.
casey2: Statcon 101: Gambling addicts take loans to gamble, those loans are sold to your pension fund. Who is the loser?
OutOfHere: Just because an insider bets on something does not in any way make the bet obvious to onlookers until the event is materialized for all to see. There is absolutely no surfacing of intelligence here because big bets are on both sides, winning and losing.
OutOfHere: The most Occam-safe explanation is not insider trading but actually hard work in analytics to rapidly surface intelligence from X and other alternative data sources.
operatingthetan: I haven't actually used the platforms except looking at betting odds for elections. Do they give any tools for looking at past results and analyzing?
_the_inflator: Oh well this is so bad.Perfectly timed - and I thought: minute? No, a day! Pretty precise and since there are time zone differences what context did they use?A laughable article. How many was lost because others bet on another day?Really. Such a joke. Perfectly timed - 100k…It is part of the system by design that someone needs to warn while others not. All are looking into a crystal ball.Someone got killed? OMG, how precise! I bet there are thousands of such bets running and not working because the person still lives.Imagine how dumb this is: this isn’t a mafia hit job some streets further down the road - this is an operation that could also have failed.And then? Would The Guardian be sorry about the loss as well, this time the money of the “poor” speculating soul? I doubt it.It is a lottery. The fact that it is won again and again is simple statistics. That’s why in Germany it got adjusted to make it harder to win. In other words: more combinations need to be used. Previously more and more people joined the lottery and therefore the chance to hit the jackpot rose due to variety.Really such a lousy article.Hedge fonds - don’t make me mention them.UK was famous during the 80th not only for the Guinness Book of Records with totally weird records but also the many bets that were possible on all the different events and outcomes in UK. You could bet on the dress the queen mom would wear on a given day, her hat - eccentric, quirky but bet is bet.There was this one guy during World Cup 2016 when Germany beat Brazil 7:1. How did he know?! The chances! Conspiracy I bet - or according to the G perfect timing.What a joke…
