Is it polymarket presenting this ability to detect insiders? Or is someone trying to sell the service of detecting insiders to those wanting to know if bets are on equal footing? (or wanting to follow insiders? or wanting to hide your identity by making multiple accounts? Are there per-account fees, when polymarket might encourage people to make multiple accounts?)
Regardless, polymarket seems to be on balance corrupting, by monetizing and normalizing use of inside information, which violates agency principles. It's not clear that it really offers hedging or predictive benefits.
When trading firms do better (after data discovery and analysis), there's some evidence they're better than other firms, and you can trust them with some money. But when there's a public prediction market, the only benefit is to the insiders.
Post author here: To clarify, this is not a post from Polymarket.
This is talking about using Compound AI (product I'm working on) to query Polymarket data, including finding insiders, just as a fun example analysis you could do.
Often you need a well-calibrated probability of a future event to feed into some other analysis, and Polymarket is pretty great for that. An example is how much insurance (hedge) to buy for some disastrous event.
If I'm an insider with 100% confidence, I'll take all offers at a certain price as long as I can afford it. Similar story for lower levels of confidence (but still inside info). There won't necessarily be any left for you to copy at a viable price.
Because there's always some uncertainty and capital limits. But the uncertainty about the outcome is itself inside info, and that's compounded with your own uncertainty about the insider as a copy trader. So the insider will empty out certain price levels only, and your certainty is strictly less than theirs, meaning you have even fewer viable levels to buy.
therefore, the polymarket betting odds will reflect the truth - even if that info is a secret that nobody else but the insider knows. And if this is the case, then even an outsider could make use of the odds as a source of info which would ensure that market efficiency (which is about the flow of information) is high.
If you believe Polymarket as a serious source of truth, consider that somebody manipulated "Will Jesus Christ return before 2027?" because there was a secondary market on whether that market will rise above 5%. Which defeats the whole idea that the betting odds will reflect the truth. Also even pre-manipulation I don't think a 2% chance that Jesus will return was reflective of truth.
The issue comes from situations where the insiders can alter the answer to help their own bets. The simple example is the bet on how long a press conference will be: It's a ridiculous bet when the person giving said press conference can bet and fleece the market.
Will X country invade another before or after day X? A large enough market changes the answer, as the agent can change the decision. And we can see this kind of thing in many interesting questions.
These are not secret divinations though, the participants know this and price it in or otherwise allow it to determine which markets they participate in.
That someone with inside information will e.g. make 500% while those late to the party e.g. only get 10%? (of course your example is not very realistic to begin with)
Has there ever been any documented circumstance where significant inside information became public and known thanks to a trade? Most often, the trade is made at the last minute, and the information gets subsequently revealed anyway. And it's impossible to tell whether somebody is an inside trader, a wealthy gambling addict making a stupid decision, or hypothetically a foreign agent pretending to be an inside trader to make people believe in a particular outcome.
It's impossible to know anything for certain; almost everything is probabilistic.
Also I'm not sure how to interpret your criteria because timing matters, I don't think saying 'it gets revealed in the end' is very meaningful.
Anyway, on Polymarket specifically, sure, military strikes are a common one. Seems like a useful signal to go hide in the basement. Outside Polymarket, there were insider trades in 2008 that I'm sure were useful.
No vigilant insider is making a series of "single market predictions with high accuracy" on the same account. They would make unlinkable bets on fresh accounts.
> Regardless, polymarket seems to be on balance corrupting, by monetizing and normalizing use of inside information,
This is a common take on "inside information", but for most people this opinion is totally unaligned with their own goals.
The people who benefit from "no insider trading" in any market, are a small group of active traders, some institutional, some not.
For literally everyone else, insider trading is a net win. Insider trading improves price discovery. If you passively invest then you benefit from the price being more accurate when whatever fraction of your paycheck goes into the market.
I don't know your own situation, maybe you are one of those few traders who needs information to spread a certain way in order to make money. For everyone else, don't be fooled into promoting an idea against your own interests.
In fact, a lot of people claim that the main point of prediction markets is to give the general public better predictions, and insider participation actually helps with that.
This is missing the primary reasons insider trading is bad, which are that it's an information theft incentive against employers, and worse, that it's a sabotage incentive.
Clearly the people who benefit from insider trading in any market are those doing the insider trading, not all market participants.
The argument is not that Polymarket et al are "insider trading only" but rather that insider trading in those markets is not regulated so people can get ahead of trades based on confidential information and make a lot of money off of all the suckers gambling their money away on ridiculously frivolous bets.
If you don't see the problem with that, you're complicit, misinformed or brainwashed.
A similar issue is that of market manipulation, since many markets in these platforms can be directly manipulated by participants in manners as easily as spamming some words on an earnings call.
> If you don't see the problem with that, you're complicit, misinformed or brainwashed.
The problem that I imagine you see with this, is that it doesn't conform to a particular, special, notion of fairness that you think the market should have.
Informed parties have an edge over uninformed parties. This edge is "unfair" if you believe the market should be a lottery. The market is designed to pay people with accurate beliefs, by taking from people with inaccurate beliefs. Everyone's belief is valued based on its accuracy, and the market is fair in that sense.
Fairness is actually irrelevant to the societal good the market provides, which is to produce accurate prices. A third party, who doesn't participate, shouldn't care about the market being "fair", they should care about it giving good information.
> A similar issue is that of market manipulation, since many markets in these platforms can be directly manipulated by participants in manners as easily as spamming some words on an earnings call.
If you are betting on what a person will say, and the person knows about the market, that is a chaotic system. If you bid the price away from max entropy then you deserve the outcome.
This has nothing to do with fairness of outcomes but with defrauding naive investors of their money.
For context, I'm a former Investment Banker so this isn't coming from a place of naivete but an informed view. I did have to study SEC regulations for those FINRA examinations....
>But when there's a public prediction market, the only benefit is to the insiders.
false.
all the conclusions economists draw in microeconomic theory about efficient markets are based on pricing that reflects symmetric information. secrets are asymmetric. trading on inside information drives the market price in the direction it should be moving, making the market more efficient, a benefit to all participants in the market.
this is not a defense of trading on inside information, simply pointing out the mechanics.
We're not solving for efficient pricing at the expense of one insider reaping all the benefits because they already either knew or set the price before hand.
I think you might misunderstand the value preposition. Polymarket wants insider trading. That's the whole point. They'll eventually cave in to PR pressure and deviate from the original purpose, though.
This is largely the classical objection to prediction markets. But prediction markets do have value to outside of the markets because people want to know the future.
Prediction markets should be accurate, not fair. If people want to gamble without doing the work of finding some alpha, they should head to a casino, not a prediction market.
yes, they allow you to pay people who have information about the future for that information, in a distributed manner. this is great if, like many people, you want information about the future.
The prediction market itself is a ouija board. You're given a number. You don't know who's moving the needle or why. You don't know what you're paying for. Maybe you're paying for information from people who are breaking someone's trust by giving it to you? Or maybe you're paying them to make it happen?
Although, sometimes a market provides incentive to publish information that's associated with the market being influenced. For example, someone can do an investigation, short the stock, then publish it.
but like, here in the real world, farmers use weather derivatives. so the technology works, has a use case, is proven.
if your point is that one should not treat the market's number as some oracular probability, then... of course i agree! there is no such thing. the market provides a signal, like any other.
Not a farmer, but I believe they use weather derivatives to hedge and weather forecasts for predictions? Going through markets for weather forecasts is adding a level of indirection that generates a noisier signal.
The idea when hedging isn't to win on expected value. It's to reduce risk. You're paying the market to provide insurance.
As a side effect, insurance does sometimes generate interesting data. The insurance industry generates good data about life expectancy. But it doesn't tell you when you're going to die.
Good points, but commodity futures and stock prices take into account all sorts of information. They go haywire sometimes but given how hard it is to beat the market, they seem to do a pretty good job of aggregating it all.
As we learn from reading Matt Levine, they might also be taking into account signals that are irrelevant to you for technical reasons, or just nonsense. Often it works well but sometimes you get meme stocks.
Which is why I said "they go haywire sometimes." But in most cases, they work well enough that very few professional investors are able to consistently beat the judgement of the market.
just to be clear about what you're saying, you would predict that the implied probabilities from weather derivative prices are often very different than what is forecasted, and, when those differences occur, it is the forecast that is more likely to be right?
you dont need to pay to access the odds - it's public info.
There are people who pay to make bets on it (if they think the odds are wrong). But you don't have to be a betting participant to access the betting odds. You simply use the betting odds as a prediction of a future outcome, and you take your action/planning accordingly.
But usually when prediction markets have shown interesting predictions, it's by odds taking large swings then collapsing to the correct outcome relatively shortly before the event right?
I assume because even if you know the future perfectly, putting up large lump sums early could cap your upside if people take your large sum as a signal (like OP is doing)
As a viewer you can take your own short-term "actions" (gambles) outside the market using the brief advanced notice I guess, but I'm not sure planning works like that.
In other words, what happens to the accuracy of prediction markets if we're including the discrete odds that occured along the way to the final odds? It's not better than random chance or public sentiment for large events is it?
Sure, but I meant it in the sense that someone needs to lose money or there's no point in smarter or more well-informed people playing. Their profits have to come from somewhere.
These could be (a) people who aren't as smart as they think they are (b) people who subsidize the market in order to get good predictions (c) people who are hedging (essentially, buying insurance). Perhaps other possibilities.
It’s good that it’s voluntary, but that’s not really what I’m getting at. People voluntarily spend money in Vegas and buy meme coins too.
This doesn’t tell us all that much about whether a price signal is a valuable source of information. Often, people have varied interpretations of what a price movement means. The price doesn’t tell you how to interpret it. The obvious interpretation can be wrong.
Historical records, notably by Herodotus, confirm that the Persian Empire used gold to bribe Greek Oracles, turning "divine prophecy" into a psychological warfare tool.
This mirrors a core flaw in Polymarket: profit maximization is not truth-seeking. Just as Persian bribes manipulated ancient morale, modern "whales" can distort market odds to manufacture narratives or hedge external interests. In both cases, the prediction is a commodity sold to the highest bidder rather than an objective forecast of reality.
This comparison is flawed because accountability creates a structural divide. A newspaper has a visible masthead and named editors, creating a reputational stake where consistent bias leads to institutional ruin.
In contrast, Polymarket relies on pseudonymous liquidity. A "whale" can use a "Persian bribe" to distort odds and then vanish without consequence. While a newspaper offers a testable argument, Polymarket provides a "math-washed" price signal that allows financial manipulation to masquerade as objective probability.
i don't believe such a concept exists. if you do, then you have greater epistemic problems that should be resolved first, before reading either the newspaper, or the prediction market.
Dismissing "objective probability" is a convenient philosophical retreat that strips Polymarket of its only legitimate function. If the market isn’t an attempt to aggregate information toward a binary, external "ground truth," then it isn't a forecasting tool—it’s a "Keynesian Beauty Contest" where people bet on what they think others believe rather than what will actually happen.
Without an objective anchor to measure against, concepts like "mispricing" or "alpha" become logically impossible; you cannot have a "wrong" price if you don't believe a "right" probability exists. If we accept that the market signal is just a reflection of whale liquidity and "Persian bribes" rather than a calculated proximity to reality, then the platform is merely a math-washed gambling hall. Ultimately, a prediction market that abandons the pursuit of objective truth loses its epistemic utility and its entire reason to exist.
Information about the future without power to do anything about it (except bet on it), like is the case for most information and most people, is useless.
Because the people who are consistently right will consistently win money and will make bigger bets which move the price more, in the limit case making the price converge on the true probability of the outcome.
This is the theoretical underpinning of prediction markets.
Equating being "consistently right" with having a sufficiently large stash of capital is ludicrous.
"right" people will wisely take most their winnings out of a high-variance market. "wrong" people with deep pockets (or lots of wrong people with shallow pockets) will continue to distort the market.
they can only do so as long as they have enough capital to lose. Because every time they try to move the betting markets against the truth, they will simply lose that money when the event happens (and turns out they were wrong).
So any distortion will merely be temporary. Unless they have access to unlimited capital of course - which is not true yet for anyone (but the US gov't).
Apart from minor effects, the price is the probability. If you 'know your shit', you have more confidence and thus bid up or down until there are no more counterparties willing to accept your price, and thus the price settles at approximately the expert/insider probability.
like any signal, you reflect on it, integrate it into your belief, think through the consequences, etc.
we all want mr. delphi to tell us exactly what will happen. but without such a friend, we reason under uncertainty. markets are one tool we've found to coordinate such signals.
would you ask the same of hiring a private investigator, or paying for the new york times? there is no authority with your interests but yourself; you must choose who to trust.
They also allow people to convince those who trust that prediction markets are accurate barometers of likeliness that certain events will be likely with a meager amount of money.
Isn’t this the motivation behind polymarket? To incentivize those that have information to bet as a signal of “truth”. What I don’t get is why would anyone bet on this stuff that don’t have insider information besides those with gambling addiction.
It's not just a gambling addiction, but many people consider themselves smarter than the average person, and nature's way of punishing these people is creating things like stock markets and polymarkets.
There’s also a vague argument around hedging some actual risks that some market participants genuinely want to hedge… which depends a lot on the specific bet. Eg hedging exposure to specific political events, wars or even company announcements can be relevant and worth a premium for non-insiders. Where there’s a premium to be collected there are speculators to do so.
Definitely not. It’s more like either winning a 1B B2B contract or going bankrupt. Like I said above you don’t want to scale up taking high variance shots because it will reduce variance and converge towards the mean
To be clear, I meant the opposite. I meant that if you take a high variance swing and you lose, you have capped downside, so you can rebuild and recover hard long term. Conversely if you win you have a huge head start and can deploy the capital quickly.
Of course you DONT want to repeatedly take -EV bets. That would reduce variance and converge you to the mean which is negative by the central limit theorem.
"High variance, slightly-negative EV shots on a long time horizon" is a gambling addict's way of justifying the old adage, "sure, we're losing money on each sale, but we'll make up for it in volume!"
It is for people like me. I'm usually right about things before other people even know about them. Bought BTC in 2011, ETH in 2014 (funded the IPO), Tesla in 2013, Microsoft right when they replaced Ballmer (at $30 I think), Nvidia on the Covid crash day in 2020, learned Rust in 2017, took AI seriously two weeks after ChatGPT 3.5 launched. I never had any insider information. I typically have a good feeling for things.
Great! So how do I follow your moves? Ideally the prediction market would have a way where traders like this filter to the top, but then making that information known would impact the market itself.!.!.
But “making lots of bets” is a measure of your appetite for risk, not your acumen. So unless you are filthy rich (in which case, kudos!) I think you are more proving parent’s point.
Seems more like a hobby activity than a decision that would lead to any practically meaningful outcome. Since as you said, you were already a billionaire in 2017 any money you could make by writing software yourself seems insignificant
If you're talking about crypto mining, all of the big smart contract platforms that can run something like Polymarket are running on proof of stake. Their energy usage is comparable to any other internet protocol with a similar amount of traffic.
The insider vs. lucky forecaster problem is actually tractable statistically. In equity markets, informed trading detection uses a combo of signals: order size relative to market depth, timing proximity to the resolution event, and cross-market correlation (same entity appearing in related contracts).
For onchain prediction markets specifically, the pseudonymous addresses are actually more traceable than people assume - you can cluster wallets by funding source patterns and behavioral timing even when fresh addresses are used. Sophisticated actors know this and route through mixers, but most don't bother.
The deeper problem PollardsRho hints at: if known insiders crowd out calibrated forecasters (who rationally won't participate when they expect to be adversely selected against), you get a market that's accurate but thin and fragile. That's the classic adverse selection death spiral prediction market designers have been trying to solve. Polymarket's bet-sizing dynamics actually mitigate this somewhat - insiders can't take all the liquidity without moving price against themselves.
there is some inevitable "insider trading" in commodities markets. for example if you're a giant agricultural company, and you want to hedge the price of soybeans, you have some extremely relevant insider information about the soybean market. but you're still allowed to trade soybean futures. very different than securities.
if prediction market contracts really are regulated as commodities, then presumably a lot of insider trading must be legal, although there must be limits of one kind or another and probably if you do something really egregious you might be prosecuted under some legal theory.
An agricultural company hedging the price of soybeans is precisely hedging, not speculation. The insider information they have is their supply/demand/pricing picture. That's different than the colloquial definition of insider information which I've always taken to tie to event occurrence (or not).
There is 100% insider-trading and manipulation of prediction markets. It's absurd some of the markets that are created. The most glaring example was this years super bowl halftime show. They had markets on songs Bad Bunny would sing, which song he would sing first, etc. You're telling me the thousands of people who had access to practices and information would not wager on this?
Bribing employees to disclose confidential information entrusted to them is not kosher nor wholesome. I consider corporate insider trading on these markets to be analogous - if you're an employee and you trade, you are selling your employer's info for money. Nearly every employer would fire employees caught giving away confidential information for personal bribes.
In the stock market, Matt Levine likes to say that insider training is about theft, not fairness. You can be prosecuted for merely sharing info with a friend on a golf course who then proceeds to trade. Your crime is not trading (you didn't even trade), but misappropriating information you were entrusted with and not authorized to sell.
The market economy is not about fairness but about ruthless power.
The worlds most influential people demonstrate that only power matters; that the world order we built last century through unimaginable suffering and violence matters less than securing their own personal gain; that law, morals, and order were just dreams of the weak
What about bets without insider participation, where you want the market to function as an aggregator of educated guesses? OP has one reaction to insider trading, but I imagine a very common alternative would be "those insiders make their money off of bettors like me, I shouldn't participate." Some questions are clearly insider-proof, but I imagine many questions have insiders who don't bet on Polymarket. If Polymarket is going to be a good prediction market, surely it should incentivize people to make predictions on those questions too?
It's not that it's cheating _in the market_, but if people have an obligation to their employers, etc, to keep information confidential, then they are stealing from their employer by cashing in on it, as sure as if they had taken money from the till.
Prediction markets can only pay out based on public information, which means that prediction markets can only "reveal information" like this for things that would have been public knowledge anyway. And insiders are always risking that leaking their insider info might influence the outcome of the bet against them (like if leaking the date of a covert military operation causes the operation to be rescheduled), so they're financially incentivized to wait as long as possible before tacitly revealing that information. So prediction markets are the worst possible way of revealing hidden information: you will only learn about things you would have already known, and only when it's too late to make any use of that knowledge.
You're overlooking that sudden, unexplained or counterintuitive movements in the actual prediction market itself, well before the event occurs/market resolves can themselves convey information, about what apparent insiders think (or whales want to manipulate the market to think).
Consider the timing of those markets wrt 2026 national elections in US, Israel, also Sweden, legislative elections in France, Germany (as canaries for their next general elections) plus a possible change in UK PM, plus any possible Ukraine or Venezuela outcomes. And of course events in the stock market or energy markets make certain outcomes more/less likely.
Also, on Polymarket traders often buy and sell before a market resolves, to exploit patterns in other traders.
And consider what happens at major media e.g. CNN now they've partnered with Kalshi, wrt whether the broadcasting certain predictions/viewpoints/interviewees get boosted/suppressed.
> movements in the actual prediction market itself, well before the event occurs/market resolves can themselves convey information, about what apparent insiders think (or whales want to manipulate the market to think)
Yes, and surely you see that the inability to distinguish between true signal and deliberate countersignal until after the bet has resolved is an indictment of the very model of predictions markets. Like a qubit, you must collapse the waveform to extract the information.
There's also a financial incentive to get your bets in early, while the odds are still in your favor. The longer you wait, the higher the risk that your secret becomes public knowledge.
I agree it's not perfect, but I think you're underplaying a lot of the value.
Trading on non-public information in prediction markets is illegal (in the United States) if the information was obtained through fraud, deception, a breach of trust—such as compromising a position of privilege—or from a confidential government source. For example, if you work at Google and know that Gemini 3 will be released on a certain date, trading on that insight is illegal because you are legally misappropriating your employer’s proprietary information. Furthermore, even if you did not personally breach a position of privilege to get the information, executing the trade can still be prosecuted as federal wire fraud if doing so violates the prediction platform's terms of service.
However, if you trade on prediction markets using insider information that was gained WITHOUT fraud, deception, or a breach of trust, then so long as the market's terms of service allow it, you can go ahead and trade on that information. Polymarket is a prime example of this: unlike traditional financial exchanges, its Terms of Service do not explicitly forbid everyday users from trading on inside information. Instead, the platform relies on a catch-all rule prohibiting activity that violates "applicable laws." This means that as long as you acquired the inside information legally—without hacking, stealing, or breaching a duty of confidentiality—Polymarket permits you to capitalize on it, treating your informational advantage as a feature that ultimately makes the market's odds more accurate.
LoL. Some day soon, we will all need to carry proof of humanness and have our English Literature transcripts from university to evidence that we did, actually, learn to write at some point.
Because its an event contract with a defined upside/downside and time horizon. You know exactly what you stand to lose and gain and when. Makes it a valuable part of some intricate financial strategies.
> it's clear prediction markets like Polymarket incentivize sharing information
I severely dislike these euphemisms used by prediction market enthusiasts. What exactly is the value of information like “most searched person on Google in year N”? Creating 10s of options to answer this question via gambling on Polymarket/Kalshi does not help anyone except their fellow degenerates. Heck, even events like “by N date the USA invade country X” also offer no real value, except for the insider circle to front run their own invasion and profit from it. Even worse, apparently they provide anonymity and cover to illegal participants (eg obviously US citizens) just like crypto exchanges like Binance did.
I truly question the sanity of those who believe that prediction markets are providing a positive force in this world.
I'm very tempted to agree that those markets are not providing a positive force, given the focus on questions for which a small group of people know the answer ahead of time. They are not sharing that information because it is not in their interest, and insiders likely won’t have a great time for long.
However, there is large value for some people in knowing when a country will be invaded: if you live there, you know when to leave; if you are an airline, when to stop scheduling flights there, or, if a lot of people are in the first group, up until when to schedule many more flights to get them out. But I’m positive the invading army would prefer some kid in a basement didn’t make one Lieutenant General on the committee obscenely rich overnight.
I wished the focused on markets where many people are part of the decision, like elections. There, the wisdom of the crowds would add some value.
> there is large value for some people in knowing when a country will be invaded
Are there any examples of people/companies trusting degenerate gamblers on prediction markets and making real life-changing decisions?
All the examples I’ve seen are exactly what I started in my original post - the insider circle opening a massive position on the right invasion date mere minutes/hours before they actually do it. This is useful to precisely nobody! And it happens because they are insiders, who want to avoid risk of exposure. Not to share their godly wisdom with the world for others benefit.
I don't have links. I'm a yeshiva student and many of my friends study in Israel and/or fly back and forth and I know multiple people who used polymarket to make flying decisions.
> questioning the fundamental basis of this.
Empirically, you can look at https://calibration.city/ (among other such trackers) look at polymarket, filter by market midpoint and you'll see that if a market resolves in a year, and 6 months in it's at 30%, the actual event happens at (remarkably close) to 30% of the time.
Theoretically, it relies on standard market theories, like efficient markets hypothesis etc. Basically, however corn comes ot be valued correctly, much of the same mechanisms are present here
Doesn’t Orthodox Judaism (like all religions) look quite harshly upon all forms of gambling? How is Polymarket kosher?
To be clear, I didn’t question efficient market hypotheses - my stance has been pretty clear along the thread, questioning the value of the kind of information gambled upon in popular prediction markets.
Yes, it does. I never gambled on Polymarket, I look at it to figure out the odds of things I care about.
I thought I explained the value quite clearly. ~10 years ago if you wanted to know the odds your flight will get canceled due to war, you had to trust the hyperventilating talking head on your favorite cable news channel (who's job it was to keep you watching...). Now you get basically the actual odds. If that's not value, I don't know what is.
I find the way you operate - supporting and benefitting from Polymarket - to be equally disdainful from the same moralistic standpoint that gambling is banned from, but I guess even in orthodoxy one can bend the rules to their liking.
> Now you get basically the actual odds.
But that's the thing - insiders bet & trade at the very last minute, and thus are not supporting the /just cause/ of "information sharing", rather just plain, old front-running and racketeering. The odds you see when booking your flight are not the real odds - when the actual action happens just before event takes place.
> equally disdainful from the same moralistic standpoint that gambling is banned from
I don't know which religion/s you're familiar with but I bet you don't know the reason gambling is prohibited in Judaism. It doesn't carry the moral stench you think it does. I've been studying Talmudic law for a very very long time and am confident there is no issue with using polymarket to get the odds on anything.
> The odds you see when booking your flight are not the real odds
In my previous comment I shared a link with you (https://calibration.city/) I told you to filter by market midpoint.
I don't know if you didn't see it or you are being obtuse but between repeating something I disproved and lecturing me about my religion, I have my suspicions...
Value? The market itself values having Google insiders ("Wow I can now ask questions about Googles' internal affairs") and Google values knowledge of leaks.
Aside from those tertiary effects, perhaps people would pay Google to know this information ahead of time but previously lacked the coordination to make a deal directly.
I'm sure people with business (plans) in country X question your sanity too. Markets create value, not postitve force. Only people can do that.
> “Hedge funds invest a ton in "alternative data", like credit card transaction data or satellite-imagery (are Walmart's parking lots full?) and need to process as much relevant information as possible to make predictions that are relevant to investments. “
Ah yes the famous credit card data and Walmart parking lots example that hedge funds were giving a few years ago in every interview and news article. Safe to assume that specifically these data sets are not what you should look at to make money.
> An interesting question is if agents are much better at querying data than humans, do we even need the awkwardness of SQL,
It’s an interesting question, my hunch is that for now “in-distribution reasoning” is going to be much more effective than custom data query APIs. But perhaps not! I’d read that paper.
iirc polymarket doesn't explicitly rule against this, and neither does the law. prediction trading like this operates as "commodities" trading, so they have no obligation to prevent this, and indeed they have an financial incentive to let it continue (assuming others don't leave the platform!)
I don’t think that’s right. Prediction markets fall under CFTC oversight, and the CFTC absolutely has insider trading rules. We just haven’t seen any enforcement yet. Partly because the space is still new, and partly because enforcement priorities have been uneven lately (to put it mildly).
The CFTC has already signaled it’s starting to look more closely at insider trading in prediction markets. It's almost certainly just a matter of time. It's pretty likely a future administration will clamp down on this, if the current one doesn't.
You can see when they buy or sell a position. It's on the blockchain so it's all public. And yes, copying positions is called copy-trading and it's extremely popular.
Orders aren't public though. Only the actual trades. This is important because by the time the trade is known by others very often the edge is gone. Especially if you have other people watching the same trader and they all try to copy the trade at the same time.
Not all strategies are low-latency, so you can copy trade someone with a buy and hold approach. For example someone you think is an insider or whale who might influence the outcome.
Even if there wasn't any kind of insider betting going on, it just seems so disgusting to turn literally everything into a casino.
There's a bet going on right now about Jesus coming back before 2027 [1], and a part of me wants to do it because I'm pretty confident Jesus isn't coming back by the end of the year (or any year), but it seems kind of wrong to try and extract money out of people who are gambling away their money.
The returns on [1] seem to be worse than CDs, and with no government insurance, so it's not worth it at the current payout. But if a religious event spikes the odds, it'll be worth taking the other side of this bet.
Polymarket's legality has not yet been tested in many places, although I don't personally object to it being legal, there's a chance it might not be.
Also, I'd advise against betting on the Jesus market. You can't actually read the price as a probability here due to time value of money, opportunity cost, etc. So you'd lose money (or at best, gain nothing) by betting against it. It's priced correctly.
> Also, I'd advise against betting on the Jesus market. You can't actually read the price as a probability here due to time value of money, opportunity cost, etc. So you'd lose money (or at best, gain nothing) by betting against it. It's priced correctly.
Yeah, and assuming Jesus doesn't come back that's only about a 3.6% return rate, which is what Treasury Bills are getting right now [1]. At that point I might as well do that and avoid paying state tax on my interest.
Exactly, the existence of alternatives is mostly what keeps the price non-zero. I think counterparties who are actually betting on Jesus returning will be quite rare. So I wouldn't feel bad about taking money from saps, more about just getting a bad rate of return for yourself.
Still, I just find the idea of turning everything in politics into a casino kind of gross. Taken to the extreme it can get pretty disgusting.
Like, imagine that there were a Polymarket of "Will COVID deaths break 1 million?" or "Will <Insert Serial Killer> Take His Fifth Victim?".
These are hyperbolic examples and I'm not saying that anything on Polymarket is that bad, but even the stuff that's currently on there right now like "Khamenei out as Supreme Leader of Iran by March 31?" [1] or "Israel strikes Iran by February 28, 2026?" [2] seems kind of crass. These are real issues that have real consequences that affect many real humans (who are no less valuable than me) and people are treating this shit like a fucking game.
I'm not accusing you of that, to be clear, it's just why I find Polymarket to be gross and I'm not sure it should be legal.
The market already bets on war and death, and has done for probably centuries, only it's mostly institutional players. Seems to me Polymarket just democratizes that, both for bettors and potentially consumers of the probabilities.
I would say the average person is terrible at aggregating media and making predictions, at least this way they can access expert opinion for free.
Of course as yet it's still niche nerd stuff but if I were in Iran, I'd probably find a signal about imminent strikes or future regime change quite useful.
I'm in Israel. If you turn on the TV lately, you will inevitably hear a bunch of talking heads endlessly analyzing every word Trump said, and the movement of various US military apparatus, and then sharing "expert" insights into when there's going to be an escalation.
I can't do anything about this, except decide when it's time to pack my go-bag and leave it near the door so I'm ready to go to the bomb shelter in middle of the night. To that end, polymarket odds are helpful. I'd never bet any money myself, of course.
In related news, I read recently that the IDF is currently investigating some personnel who evidently made money predicting the last Israel-Iran flare up using inside information. Naturally this is quite unlawful.
I don't like it when governments and military contractors and billionaires gamble with human lives either.
Even if you can derive some utility out of the metrics doesn't mean it's good. One can find silver linings in many illegal things but that doesn't imply that it should be legal.
Speculation and concern from a naive observer:
Is it polymarket presenting this ability to detect insiders? Or is someone trying to sell the service of detecting insiders to those wanting to know if bets are on equal footing? (or wanting to follow insiders? or wanting to hide your identity by making multiple accounts? Are there per-account fees, when polymarket might encourage people to make multiple accounts?)
Regardless, polymarket seems to be on balance corrupting, by monetizing and normalizing use of inside information, which violates agency principles. It's not clear that it really offers hedging or predictive benefits.
When trading firms do better (after data discovery and analysis), there's some evidence they're better than other firms, and you can trust them with some money. But when there's a public prediction market, the only benefit is to the insiders.
Post author here: To clarify, this is not a post from Polymarket.
This is talking about using Compound AI (product I'm working on) to query Polymarket data, including finding insiders, just as a fun example analysis you could do.
Often you need a well-calibrated probability of a future event to feed into some other analysis, and Polymarket is pretty great for that. An example is how much insurance (hedge) to buy for some disastrous event.
Why dont you just copy the trades?
If I'm an insider with 100% confidence, I'll take all offers at a certain price as long as I can afford it. Similar story for lower levels of confidence (but still inside info). There won't necessarily be any left for you to copy at a viable price.
You might not have enough money to drain the order book.
And there's always a chance things go wrong, even with inside information. It would be unwise to go all in.
The examples didn’t look like they’ve completely emptied the orderbook
Because there's always some uncertainty and capital limits. But the uncertainty about the outcome is itself inside info, and that's compounded with your own uncertainty about the insider as a copy trader. So the insider will empty out certain price levels only, and your certainty is strictly less than theirs, meaning you have even fewer viable levels to buy.
> Similar story for lower levels of confidence
therefore, the polymarket betting odds will reflect the truth - even if that info is a secret that nobody else but the insider knows. And if this is the case, then even an outsider could make use of the odds as a source of info which would ensure that market efficiency (which is about the flow of information) is high.
So what's wrong with insider trading again?
If you believe Polymarket as a serious source of truth, consider that somebody manipulated "Will Jesus Christ return before 2027?" because there was a secondary market on whether that market will rise above 5%. Which defeats the whole idea that the betting odds will reflect the truth. Also even pre-manipulation I don't think a 2% chance that Jesus will return was reflective of truth.
https://gizmodo.com/checking-in-on-polymarket-bets-on-christ...
The issue comes from situations where the insiders can alter the answer to help their own bets. The simple example is the bet on how long a press conference will be: It's a ridiculous bet when the person giving said press conference can bet and fleece the market.
Will X country invade another before or after day X? A large enough market changes the answer, as the agent can change the decision. And we can see this kind of thing in many interesting questions.
These are not secret divinations though, the participants know this and price it in or otherwise allow it to determine which markets they participate in.
That someone with inside information will e.g. make 500% while those late to the party e.g. only get 10%? (of course your example is not very realistic to begin with)
So is any kind of business illegal? Making investments?
How is this distinguishable from pump-dump?
It rewards blatant corruption? What's the benefit is the bigger question.
The benefit is that inside information becomes public information. The reward for the insider is just the necessary incentive for that to happen.
Has there ever been any documented circumstance where significant inside information became public and known thanks to a trade? Most often, the trade is made at the last minute, and the information gets subsequently revealed anyway. And it's impossible to tell whether somebody is an inside trader, a wealthy gambling addict making a stupid decision, or hypothetically a foreign agent pretending to be an inside trader to make people believe in a particular outcome.
It's impossible to know anything for certain; almost everything is probabilistic.
Also I'm not sure how to interpret your criteria because timing matters, I don't think saying 'it gets revealed in the end' is very meaningful.
Anyway, on Polymarket specifically, sure, military strikes are a common one. Seems like a useful signal to go hide in the basement. Outside Polymarket, there were insider trades in 2008 that I'm sure were useful.
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Past performance is not an indicator of future performance.
Shouldn't it be if you suspect they are executed by an insider?
You can't be sure that they are an insider or lucky, just from onchain data.
If they make single market predictions with high accuracy it is very very likely they are
No vigilant insider is making a series of "single market predictions with high accuracy" on the same account. They would make unlinkable bets on fresh accounts.
> No vigilant insider is making a series of "single market predictions with high accuracy" on the same account.
There seem to be quite a few non-vigilant insiders. That's the very premise of the post we're discussing.
This is unsurprising to anyone who's seen the various ways people get busted for insider trading in equities.
Also insider trading is A-OK on prediction markets!
> Regardless, polymarket seems to be on balance corrupting, by monetizing and normalizing use of inside information,
This is a common take on "inside information", but for most people this opinion is totally unaligned with their own goals. The people who benefit from "no insider trading" in any market, are a small group of active traders, some institutional, some not.
For literally everyone else, insider trading is a net win. Insider trading improves price discovery. If you passively invest then you benefit from the price being more accurate when whatever fraction of your paycheck goes into the market.
I don't know your own situation, maybe you are one of those few traders who needs information to spread a certain way in order to make money. For everyone else, don't be fooled into promoting an idea against your own interests.
In fact, a lot of people claim that the main point of prediction markets is to give the general public better predictions, and insider participation actually helps with that.
This is missing the primary reasons insider trading is bad, which are that it's an information theft incentive against employers, and worse, that it's a sabotage incentive.
I'm honestly puzzled by this take.
Clearly the people who benefit from insider trading in any market are those doing the insider trading, not all market participants.
The argument is not that Polymarket et al are "insider trading only" but rather that insider trading in those markets is not regulated so people can get ahead of trades based on confidential information and make a lot of money off of all the suckers gambling their money away on ridiculously frivolous bets.
If you don't see the problem with that, you're complicit, misinformed or brainwashed.
A similar issue is that of market manipulation, since many markets in these platforms can be directly manipulated by participants in manners as easily as spamming some words on an earnings call.
> If you don't see the problem with that, you're complicit, misinformed or brainwashed.
The problem that I imagine you see with this, is that it doesn't conform to a particular, special, notion of fairness that you think the market should have.
Informed parties have an edge over uninformed parties. This edge is "unfair" if you believe the market should be a lottery. The market is designed to pay people with accurate beliefs, by taking from people with inaccurate beliefs. Everyone's belief is valued based on its accuracy, and the market is fair in that sense. Fairness is actually irrelevant to the societal good the market provides, which is to produce accurate prices. A third party, who doesn't participate, shouldn't care about the market being "fair", they should care about it giving good information.
> A similar issue is that of market manipulation, since many markets in these platforms can be directly manipulated by participants in manners as easily as spamming some words on an earnings call.
If you are betting on what a person will say, and the person knows about the market, that is a chaotic system. If you bid the price away from max entropy then you deserve the outcome.
This has nothing to do with fairness of outcomes but with defrauding naive investors of their money.
For context, I'm a former Investment Banker so this isn't coming from a place of naivete but an informed view. I did have to study SEC regulations for those FINRA examinations....
>But when there's a public prediction market, the only benefit is to the insiders.
false.
all the conclusions economists draw in microeconomic theory about efficient markets are based on pricing that reflects symmetric information. secrets are asymmetric. trading on inside information drives the market price in the direction it should be moving, making the market more efficient, a benefit to all participants in the market.
this is not a defense of trading on inside information, simply pointing out the mechanics.
We're not solving for efficient pricing at the expense of one insider reaping all the benefits because they already either knew or set the price before hand.
I think you might misunderstand the value preposition. Polymarket wants insider trading. That's the whole point. They'll eventually cave in to PR pressure and deviate from the original purpose, though.
Some of the things people bet on can be decided by a single person.
The more accurate the markets get, the greater the incentive for insiders to spoil it.
That doesn’t benefit anyone but the insider and probably has a net negative on everyone else.
This is largely the classical objection to prediction markets. But prediction markets do have value to outside of the markets because people want to know the future.
Yep it's rotten. I think the intuitive revulsion many feel toward the Polymarket is simply due to the unfairness of it.
Prediction markets should be accurate, not fair. If people want to gamble without doing the work of finding some alpha, they should head to a casino, not a prediction market.
>Prediction markets have been called "truth machines" because anyone who has information missing from the market can profit.
That sounds like "insider trading" machines, or "scam" machines, rather than truth machines.
yes, they allow you to pay people who have information about the future for that information, in a distributed manner. this is great if, like many people, you want information about the future.
The prediction market itself is a ouija board. You're given a number. You don't know who's moving the needle or why. You don't know what you're paying for. Maybe you're paying for information from people who are breaking someone's trust by giving it to you? Or maybe you're paying them to make it happen?
Although, sometimes a market provides incentive to publish information that's associated with the market being influenced. For example, someone can do an investigation, short the stock, then publish it.
but like, here in the real world, farmers use weather derivatives. so the technology works, has a use case, is proven.
if your point is that one should not treat the market's number as some oracular probability, then... of course i agree! there is no such thing. the market provides a signal, like any other.
Not a farmer, but I believe they use weather derivatives to hedge and weather forecasts for predictions? Going through markets for weather forecasts is adding a level of indirection that generates a noisier signal.
The idea when hedging isn't to win on expected value. It's to reduce risk. You're paying the market to provide insurance.
As a side effect, insurance does sometimes generate interesting data. The insurance industry generates good data about life expectancy. But it doesn't tell you when you're going to die.
Good points, but commodity futures and stock prices take into account all sorts of information. They go haywire sometimes but given how hard it is to beat the market, they seem to do a pretty good job of aggregating it all.
As we learn from reading Matt Levine, they might also be taking into account signals that are irrelevant to you for technical reasons, or just nonsense. Often it works well but sometimes you get meme stocks.
Which is why I said "they go haywire sometimes." But in most cases, they work well enough that very few professional investors are able to consistently beat the judgement of the market.
just to be clear about what you're saying, you would predict that the implied probabilities from weather derivative prices are often very different than what is forecasted, and, when those differences occur, it is the forecast that is more likely to be right?
...would you like to make a bet to this effect?
you dont need to pay to access the odds - it's public info.
There are people who pay to make bets on it (if they think the odds are wrong). But you don't have to be a betting participant to access the betting odds. You simply use the betting odds as a prediction of a future outcome, and you take your action/planning accordingly.
But usually when prediction markets have shown interesting predictions, it's by odds taking large swings then collapsing to the correct outcome relatively shortly before the event right?
I assume because even if you know the future perfectly, putting up large lump sums early could cap your upside if people take your large sum as a signal (like OP is doing)
As a viewer you can take your own short-term "actions" (gambles) outside the market using the brief advanced notice I guess, but I'm not sure planning works like that.
In other words, what happens to the accuracy of prediction markets if we're including the discrete odds that occured along the way to the final odds? It's not better than random chance or public sentiment for large events is it?
Sure, but I meant it in the sense that someone needs to lose money or there's no point in smarter or more well-informed people playing. Their profits have to come from somewhere.
These could be (a) people who aren't as smart as they think they are (b) people who subsidize the market in order to get good predictions (c) people who are hedging (essentially, buying insurance). Perhaps other possibilities.
> the sense that someone needs to lose money
yep, and that's fine because they did so voluntarily.
If there were no stakes on the line, the information in the odds will also not have any real meaning.
It’s good that it’s voluntary, but that’s not really what I’m getting at. People voluntarily spend money in Vegas and buy meme coins too.
This doesn’t tell us all that much about whether a price signal is a valuable source of information. Often, people have varied interpretations of what a price movement means. The price doesn’t tell you how to interpret it. The obvious interpretation can be wrong.
Historical records, notably by Herodotus, confirm that the Persian Empire used gold to bribe Greek Oracles, turning "divine prophecy" into a psychological warfare tool.
This mirrors a core flaw in Polymarket: profit maximization is not truth-seeking. Just as Persian bribes manipulated ancient morale, modern "whales" can distort market odds to manufacture narratives or hedge external interests. In both cases, the prediction is a commodity sold to the highest bidder rather than an objective forecast of reality.
and newspapers are owned by fatcats. but we are still interested in what they have to say.
This comparison is flawed because accountability creates a structural divide. A newspaper has a visible masthead and named editors, creating a reputational stake where consistent bias leads to institutional ruin.
In contrast, Polymarket relies on pseudonymous liquidity. A "whale" can use a "Persian bribe" to distort odds and then vanish without consequence. While a newspaper offers a testable argument, Polymarket provides a "math-washed" price signal that allows financial manipulation to masquerade as objective probability.
> objective probability.
i don't believe such a concept exists. if you do, then you have greater epistemic problems that should be resolved first, before reading either the newspaper, or the prediction market.
Dismissing "objective probability" is a convenient philosophical retreat that strips Polymarket of its only legitimate function. If the market isn’t an attempt to aggregate information toward a binary, external "ground truth," then it isn't a forecasting tool—it’s a "Keynesian Beauty Contest" where people bet on what they think others believe rather than what will actually happen.
Without an objective anchor to measure against, concepts like "mispricing" or "alpha" become logically impossible; you cannot have a "wrong" price if you don't believe a "right" probability exists. If we accept that the market signal is just a reflection of whale liquidity and "Persian bribes" rather than a calculated proximity to reality, then the platform is merely a math-washed gambling hall. Ultimately, a prediction market that abandons the pursuit of objective truth loses its epistemic utility and its entire reason to exist.
Information about the future without power to do anything about it (except bet on it), like is the case for most information and most people, is useless.
surely this criticism applies as well to... any information.
That sounds cool and fancy in theory, but how do you find that information among the noise?
like if 50 ppl vote A, 45 people vote B and 1 person who actually knows their shit votes B?
How do you find it? By amount?
Because the people who are consistently right will consistently win money and will make bigger bets which move the price more, in the limit case making the price converge on the true probability of the outcome.
This is the theoretical underpinning of prediction markets.
Equating being "consistently right" with having a sufficiently large stash of capital is ludicrous.
"right" people will wisely take most their winnings out of a high-variance market. "wrong" people with deep pockets (or lots of wrong people with shallow pockets) will continue to distort the market.
> will continue to distort the market.
they can only do so as long as they have enough capital to lose. Because every time they try to move the betting markets against the truth, they will simply lose that money when the event happens (and turns out they were wrong).
So any distortion will merely be temporary. Unless they have access to unlimited capital of course - which is not true yet for anyone (but the US gov't).
That only makes sense in a hermetically sealed system, which this is very much not.
Yes, but is this a problem? Haven't most betting markets turned out to offer accurate predictions?
Not particularly so. But even if it were, would that justify the social cost of this kind of gambling?
Well, the more often you're right, the more capital you will be able to accrue to bet with next time.
Apart from minor effects, the price is the probability. If you 'know your shit', you have more confidence and thus bid up or down until there are no more counterparties willing to accept your price, and thus the price settles at approximately the expert/insider probability.
what do you think you're asking?
like any signal, you reflect on it, integrate it into your belief, think through the consequences, etc.
we all want mr. delphi to tell us exactly what will happen. but without such a friend, we reason under uncertainty. markets are one tool we've found to coordinate such signals.
would you ask the same of hiring a private investigator, or paying for the new york times? there is no authority with your interests but yourself; you must choose who to trust.
It's not voting, it's a market
They also allow people to convince those who trust that prediction markets are accurate barometers of likeliness that certain events will be likely with a meager amount of money.
The amount of money depends on how big the markets are.
Isn’t this the motivation behind polymarket? To incentivize those that have information to bet as a signal of “truth”. What I don’t get is why would anyone bet on this stuff that don’t have insider information besides those with gambling addiction.
It's not just a gambling addiction, but many people consider themselves smarter than the average person, and nature's way of punishing these people is creating things like stock markets and polymarkets.
It’s a gambling site. The motivation behind it is to make money through transaction fees. You can bet on sports games too.
Since when does polymarket charge transaction fees?
Polymarket US has fees:
https://www.polymarketexchange.com/fees-hours.html
Some people have better data, like insiders.
Some have better models that predict with higher accuracy, given the same data.
There’s also a vague argument around hedging some actual risks that some market participants genuinely want to hedge… which depends a lot on the specific bet. Eg hedging exposure to specific political events, wars or even company announcements can be relevant and worth a premium for non-insiders. Where there’s a premium to be collected there are speculators to do so.
Because taking high variance slightly negative EV shots is not a terrible strategy when you have a long time horizon.
this is the "lose money on every sale but make it up on scale" version for gamblers and I love that for you.
Definitely not. It’s more like either winning a 1B B2B contract or going bankrupt. Like I said above you don’t want to scale up taking high variance shots because it will reduce variance and converge towards the mean
I feel like the longer your time horizon the worse -ev games are for you?
I bought one lottery ticket, I don't think my odds are gonna get any better than that.
To be clear, I meant the opposite. I meant that if you take a high variance swing and you lose, you have capped downside, so you can rebuild and recover hard long term. Conversely if you win you have a huge head start and can deploy the capital quickly.
Of course you DONT want to repeatedly take -EV bets. That would reduce variance and converge you to the mean which is negative by the central limit theorem.
By “not terrible” you mean “bad but not very bad” and not “good” right?
"High variance, slightly-negative EV shots on a long time horizon" is a gambling addict's way of justifying the old adage, "sure, we're losing money on each sale, but we'll make up for it in volume!"
Disagree, it's way more like overall our sales are losing money, but the long term plan is to get a buy out.
A strategy that works for a non-trivial amount of startups.
The idea is that if you play incorrectly long enough eventually a bigger better that's more wrong then you will come along.
It is for people like me. I'm usually right about things before other people even know about them. Bought BTC in 2011, ETH in 2014 (funded the IPO), Tesla in 2013, Microsoft right when they replaced Ballmer (at $30 I think), Nvidia on the Covid crash day in 2020, learned Rust in 2017, took AI seriously two weeks after ChatGPT 3.5 launched. I never had any insider information. I typically have a good feeling for things.
You are just such a genius. We all stand in awe. Thank you for letting me be in the presence of such towering intellect.
Some might even say Dirac like but I so NO, this simply does not go far enough.
I will remember this moment for the remainder of my life. Thank you.
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Great! So how do I follow your moves? Ideally the prediction market would have a way where traders like this filter to the top, but then making that information known would impact the market itself.!.!.
But “making lots of bets” is a measure of your appetite for risk, not your acumen. So unless you are filthy rich (in which case, kudos!) I think you are more proving parent’s point.
> learned Rust in 2017
Seems more like a hobby activity than a decision that would lead to any practically meaningful outcome. Since as you said, you were already a billionaire in 2017 any money you could make by writing software yourself seems insignificant
He even created this channel 5 years ago just for this post. Teach, me bro.
In many ways this gambling infatuation is worse than cryptocurrency, and with possibly more damaging externalities
Hmmm... crypto is bad for the planet though.
If you're talking about crypto mining, all of the big smart contract platforms that can run something like Polymarket are running on proof of stake. Their energy usage is comparable to any other internet protocol with a similar amount of traffic.
Thanks. Proof of work, now proof of stake—I clearly don't keep up with crypto mining.
Yeah most of the attention is still on Bitcoin and that'll be proof of work forever.
MAnifold also bad
The insider vs. lucky forecaster problem is actually tractable statistically. In equity markets, informed trading detection uses a combo of signals: order size relative to market depth, timing proximity to the resolution event, and cross-market correlation (same entity appearing in related contracts).
For onchain prediction markets specifically, the pseudonymous addresses are actually more traceable than people assume - you can cluster wallets by funding source patterns and behavioral timing even when fresh addresses are used. Sophisticated actors know this and route through mixers, but most don't bother.
The deeper problem PollardsRho hints at: if known insiders crowd out calibrated forecasters (who rationally won't participate when they expect to be adversely selected against), you get a market that's accurate but thin and fragile. That's the classic adverse selection death spiral prediction market designers have been trying to solve. Polymarket's bet-sizing dynamics actually mitigate this somewhat - insiders can't take all the liquidity without moving price against themselves.
there is some inevitable "insider trading" in commodities markets. for example if you're a giant agricultural company, and you want to hedge the price of soybeans, you have some extremely relevant insider information about the soybean market. but you're still allowed to trade soybean futures. very different than securities.
if prediction market contracts really are regulated as commodities, then presumably a lot of insider trading must be legal, although there must be limits of one kind or another and probably if you do something really egregious you might be prosecuted under some legal theory.
An agricultural company hedging the price of soybeans is precisely hedging, not speculation. The insider information they have is their supply/demand/pricing picture. That's different than the colloquial definition of insider information which I've always taken to tie to event occurrence (or not).
Why not both? They also have insider information and aren't required to limit their trades to those which would hedge the crops.
There is 100% insider-trading and manipulation of prediction markets. It's absurd some of the markets that are created. The most glaring example was this years super bowl halftime show. They had markets on songs Bad Bunny would sing, which song he would sing first, etc. You're telling me the thousands of people who had access to practices and information would not wager on this?
You can just stand near the stadium during practice and glean this info. I believe people did exactly that.
> Clearly, these insiders have figured out a way to cash in on information. Whether that's kosher is out-of-scope here
To the extent that the value of prediction markets is in their power to predict, insider trading is kosher. Wholesome even.
Bribing employees to disclose confidential information entrusted to them is not kosher nor wholesome. I consider corporate insider trading on these markets to be analogous - if you're an employee and you trade, you are selling your employer's info for money. Nearly every employer would fire employees caught giving away confidential information for personal bribes.
In the stock market, Matt Levine likes to say that insider training is about theft, not fairness. You can be prosecuted for merely sharing info with a friend on a golf course who then proceeds to trade. Your crime is not trading (you didn't even trade), but misappropriating information you were entrusted with and not authorized to sell.
The market economy is not about fairness but about ruthless power.
The worlds most influential people demonstrate that only power matters; that the world order we built last century through unimaginable suffering and violence matters less than securing their own personal gain; that law, morals, and order were just dreams of the weak
What about bets without insider participation, where you want the market to function as an aggregator of educated guesses? OP has one reaction to insider trading, but I imagine a very common alternative would be "those insiders make their money off of bettors like me, I shouldn't participate." Some questions are clearly insider-proof, but I imagine many questions have insiders who don't bet on Polymarket. If Polymarket is going to be a good prediction market, surely it should incentivize people to make predictions on those questions too?
It's not that it's cheating _in the market_, but if people have an obligation to their employers, etc, to keep information confidential, then they are stealing from their employer by cashing in on it, as sure as if they had taken money from the till.
Indeed. For those of us not gambling, it's really quite beneficial.
Prediction markets can only pay out based on public information, which means that prediction markets can only "reveal information" like this for things that would have been public knowledge anyway. And insiders are always risking that leaking their insider info might influence the outcome of the bet against them (like if leaking the date of a covert military operation causes the operation to be rescheduled), so they're financially incentivized to wait as long as possible before tacitly revealing that information. So prediction markets are the worst possible way of revealing hidden information: you will only learn about things you would have already known, and only when it's too late to make any use of that knowledge.
You're overlooking that sudden, unexplained or counterintuitive movements in the actual prediction market itself, well before the event occurs/market resolves can themselves convey information, about what apparent insiders think (or whales want to manipulate the market to think).
Obvious example: Polymarket now has 69(!) markets involving Iran: https://polymarket.com/predictions/iran
Consider the timing of those markets wrt 2026 national elections in US, Israel, also Sweden, legislative elections in France, Germany (as canaries for their next general elections) plus a possible change in UK PM, plus any possible Ukraine or Venezuela outcomes. And of course events in the stock market or energy markets make certain outcomes more/less likely.
Also, on Polymarket traders often buy and sell before a market resolves, to exploit patterns in other traders.
And consider what happens at major media e.g. CNN now they've partnered with Kalshi, wrt whether the broadcasting certain predictions/viewpoints/interviewees get boosted/suppressed.
> movements in the actual prediction market itself, well before the event occurs/market resolves can themselves convey information, about what apparent insiders think (or whales want to manipulate the market to think)
Yes, and surely you see that the inability to distinguish between true signal and deliberate countersignal until after the bet has resolved is an indictment of the very model of predictions markets. Like a qubit, you must collapse the waveform to extract the information.
If you can see which account placed key trades, you can determine if it's likely to be signal/countersignal/neither.
Certainly the platform itself can.
>Obvious example: Polymarket now has 69(!) markets involving Iran: https://polymarket.com/predictions/iran
You have not conveyed what information is thought by insiders in your example
There's also a financial incentive to get your bets in early, while the odds are still in your favor. The longer you wait, the higher the risk that your secret becomes public knowledge.
I agree it's not perfect, but I think you're underplaying a lot of the value.
Trading on non-public information in prediction markets is illegal (in the United States) if the information was obtained through fraud, deception, a breach of trust—such as compromising a position of privilege—or from a confidential government source. For example, if you work at Google and know that Gemini 3 will be released on a certain date, trading on that insight is illegal because you are legally misappropriating your employer’s proprietary information. Furthermore, even if you did not personally breach a position of privilege to get the information, executing the trade can still be prosecuted as federal wire fraud if doing so violates the prediction platform's terms of service.
However, if you trade on prediction markets using insider information that was gained WITHOUT fraud, deception, or a breach of trust, then so long as the market's terms of service allow it, you can go ahead and trade on that information. Polymarket is a prime example of this: unlike traditional financial exchanges, its Terms of Service do not explicitly forbid everyday users from trading on inside information. Instead, the platform relies on a catch-all rule prohibiting activity that violates "applicable laws." This means that as long as you acquired the inside information legally—without hacking, stealing, or breaching a duty of confidentiality—Polymarket permits you to capitalize on it, treating your informational advantage as a feature that ultimately makes the market's odds more accurate.
Yeah this is totally wrong. Taalas says their design is fully digital.
Lmao, this user is an AI bot, as he admits in his bio. Frankly, the many ellipses gave it away, too.
Edit: He removed the passage.
Which user is an AI bot?
(I am not a bot, but I definitely use LLMs to help me conduct research and write well-informed comments here)
> and write
welp guilty as charged!
LoL. Some day soon, we will all need to carry proof of humanness and have our English Literature transcripts from university to evidence that we did, actually, learn to write at some point.
Not sure why the dumb money keeps playing. If you're not the insider the person you're trading against is.
Because its an event contract with a defined upside/downside and time horizon. You know exactly what you stand to lose and gain and when. Makes it a valuable part of some intricate financial strategies.
Plus casinos exist. Why do people play blackjack.
"the dumb money"
Because you think you can predict the probability of the insider insidering each way and place a bet before they insider
> it's clear prediction markets like Polymarket incentivize sharing information
I severely dislike these euphemisms used by prediction market enthusiasts. What exactly is the value of information like “most searched person on Google in year N”? Creating 10s of options to answer this question via gambling on Polymarket/Kalshi does not help anyone except their fellow degenerates. Heck, even events like “by N date the USA invade country X” also offer no real value, except for the insider circle to front run their own invasion and profit from it. Even worse, apparently they provide anonymity and cover to illegal participants (eg obviously US citizens) just like crypto exchanges like Binance did.
I truly question the sanity of those who believe that prediction markets are providing a positive force in this world.
I'm very tempted to agree that those markets are not providing a positive force, given the focus on questions for which a small group of people know the answer ahead of time. They are not sharing that information because it is not in their interest, and insiders likely won’t have a great time for long.
However, there is large value for some people in knowing when a country will be invaded: if you live there, you know when to leave; if you are an airline, when to stop scheduling flights there, or, if a lot of people are in the first group, up until when to schedule many more flights to get them out. But I’m positive the invading army would prefer some kid in a basement didn’t make one Lieutenant General on the committee obscenely rich overnight.
I wished the focused on markets where many people are part of the decision, like elections. There, the wisdom of the crowds would add some value.
> there is large value for some people in knowing when a country will be invaded
Are there any examples of people/companies trusting degenerate gamblers on prediction markets and making real life-changing decisions?
All the examples I’ve seen are exactly what I started in my original post - the insider circle opening a massive position on the right invasion date mere minutes/hours before they actually do it. This is useful to precisely nobody! And it happens because they are insiders, who want to avoid risk of exposure. Not to share their godly wisdom with the world for others benefit.
> Are there any examples of people/companies trusting degenerate gamblers on prediction markets and making real life-changing decisions?
If "real life-changing decisions" includes deciding to take a flight based on polymarket placing a low price on war breaking out, then yes.
I'd also challenge you to outperform "Degenerate gamblers"
> then yes.
I missed a link to any source for this claim?
> I'd also challenge you to outperform
I wasn't making a competition out of this - rather I'm questioning the fundamental basis of this.
I don't have links. I'm a yeshiva student and many of my friends study in Israel and/or fly back and forth and I know multiple people who used polymarket to make flying decisions.
> questioning the fundamental basis of this.
Empirically, you can look at https://calibration.city/ (among other such trackers) look at polymarket, filter by market midpoint and you'll see that if a market resolves in a year, and 6 months in it's at 30%, the actual event happens at (remarkably close) to 30% of the time.
Theoretically, it relies on standard market theories, like efficient markets hypothesis etc. Basically, however corn comes ot be valued correctly, much of the same mechanisms are present here
> yeshiva
Doesn’t Orthodox Judaism (like all religions) look quite harshly upon all forms of gambling? How is Polymarket kosher?
To be clear, I didn’t question efficient market hypotheses - my stance has been pretty clear along the thread, questioning the value of the kind of information gambled upon in popular prediction markets.
Yes, it does. I never gambled on Polymarket, I look at it to figure out the odds of things I care about.
I thought I explained the value quite clearly. ~10 years ago if you wanted to know the odds your flight will get canceled due to war, you had to trust the hyperventilating talking head on your favorite cable news channel (who's job it was to keep you watching...). Now you get basically the actual odds. If that's not value, I don't know what is.
> Yes, it does.
I find the way you operate - supporting and benefitting from Polymarket - to be equally disdainful from the same moralistic standpoint that gambling is banned from, but I guess even in orthodoxy one can bend the rules to their liking.
> Now you get basically the actual odds.
But that's the thing - insiders bet & trade at the very last minute, and thus are not supporting the /just cause/ of "information sharing", rather just plain, old front-running and racketeering. The odds you see when booking your flight are not the real odds - when the actual action happens just before event takes place.
https://ritchietorres.house.gov/posts/in-response-to-suspici...
> equally disdainful from the same moralistic standpoint that gambling is banned from
I don't know which religion/s you're familiar with but I bet you don't know the reason gambling is prohibited in Judaism. It doesn't carry the moral stench you think it does. I've been studying Talmudic law for a very very long time and am confident there is no issue with using polymarket to get the odds on anything.
> The odds you see when booking your flight are not the real odds
In my previous comment I shared a link with you (https://calibration.city/) I told you to filter by market midpoint.
I don't know if you didn't see it or you are being obtuse but between repeating something I disproved and lecturing me about my religion, I have my suspicions...
Value? The market itself values having Google insiders ("Wow I can now ask questions about Googles' internal affairs") and Google values knowledge of leaks.
Aside from those tertiary effects, perhaps people would pay Google to know this information ahead of time but previously lacked the coordination to make a deal directly.
I'm sure people with business (plans) in country X question your sanity too. Markets create value, not postitve force. Only people can do that.
Question the sanity or also could question the ethics.
When I went to the main article link [0] (which for some reason was linked from a Twitter comment), it said "Page is not supported"
It's also not on archive.org Wayback Machine it seems.
So can anyone please copy and paste the article contents here? Thanks.
0: http://x.com/i/article/2024235288512569344
> “Hedge funds invest a ton in "alternative data", like credit card transaction data or satellite-imagery (are Walmart's parking lots full?) and need to process as much relevant information as possible to make predictions that are relevant to investments. “
Ah yes the famous credit card data and Walmart parking lots example that hedge funds were giving a few years ago in every interview and news article. Safe to assume that specifically these data sets are not what you should look at to make money.
> An interesting question is if agents are much better at querying data than humans, do we even need the awkwardness of SQL,
It’s an interesting question, my hunch is that for now “in-distribution reasoning” is going to be much more effective than custom data query APIs. But perhaps not! I’d read that paper.
iirc polymarket doesn't explicitly rule against this, and neither does the law. prediction trading like this operates as "commodities" trading, so they have no obligation to prevent this, and indeed they have an financial incentive to let it continue (assuming others don't leave the platform!)
I would go even further and say that it's a vital part of prediction markets as the intended theoretical goal is accuracy of predictions.
> neither does the law
I don’t think that’s right. Prediction markets fall under CFTC oversight, and the CFTC absolutely has insider trading rules. We just haven’t seen any enforcement yet. Partly because the space is still new, and partly because enforcement priorities have been uneven lately (to put it mildly).
The CFTC has already signaled it’s starting to look more closely at insider trading in prediction markets. It's almost certainly just a matter of time. It's pretty likely a future administration will clamp down on this, if the current one doesn't.
Out of curiosity, is it possible to see everyone's bets and positions in real time?
Or is the info only available later?
I'm guessing that bots predicting insiders and copying positions is already a thing.
You can see when they buy or sell a position. It's on the blockchain so it's all public. And yes, copying positions is called copy-trading and it's extremely popular.
Orders aren't public though. Only the actual trades. This is important because by the time the trade is known by others very often the edge is gone. Especially if you have other people watching the same trader and they all try to copy the trade at the same time.
Could the "trend-setter" not just buy, sell, buy, sell and own everybody who moves after him?
Yes. This is why copy-trading often fails.
If it takes so long for the actual trades to show up then why is copy-trading popular?
Not all strategies are low-latency, so you can copy trade someone with a buy and hold approach. For example someone you think is an insider or whale who might influence the outcome.
It baffles me that Polymarket is legal.
Even if there wasn't any kind of insider betting going on, it just seems so disgusting to turn literally everything into a casino.
There's a bet going on right now about Jesus coming back before 2027 [1], and a part of me wants to do it because I'm pretty confident Jesus isn't coming back by the end of the year (or any year), but it seems kind of wrong to try and extract money out of people who are gambling away their money.
[1] https://polymarket.com/event/will-jesus-christ-return-before...
The returns on [1] seem to be worse than CDs, and with no government insurance, so it's not worth it at the current payout. But if a religious event spikes the odds, it'll be worth taking the other side of this bet.
Yeah, maybe I could fabricate a Nostradamus quote that implies that removing tariffs will spark an apocalypse or something.
Polymarket's legality has not yet been tested in many places, although I don't personally object to it being legal, there's a chance it might not be.
Also, I'd advise against betting on the Jesus market. You can't actually read the price as a probability here due to time value of money, opportunity cost, etc. So you'd lose money (or at best, gain nothing) by betting against it. It's priced correctly.
> Also, I'd advise against betting on the Jesus market. You can't actually read the price as a probability here due to time value of money, opportunity cost, etc. So you'd lose money (or at best, gain nothing) by betting against it. It's priced correctly.
Yeah, and assuming Jesus doesn't come back that's only about a 3.6% return rate, which is what Treasury Bills are getting right now [1]. At that point I might as well do that and avoid paying state tax on my interest.
[1] https://home.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/...
Exactly, the existence of alternatives is mostly what keeps the price non-zero. I think counterparties who are actually betting on Jesus returning will be quite rare. So I wouldn't feel bad about taking money from saps, more about just getting a bad rate of return for yourself.
Yeah, maybe a bad example on my end.
Still, I just find the idea of turning everything in politics into a casino kind of gross. Taken to the extreme it can get pretty disgusting.
Like, imagine that there were a Polymarket of "Will COVID deaths break 1 million?" or "Will <Insert Serial Killer> Take His Fifth Victim?".
These are hyperbolic examples and I'm not saying that anything on Polymarket is that bad, but even the stuff that's currently on there right now like "Khamenei out as Supreme Leader of Iran by March 31?" [1] or "Israel strikes Iran by February 28, 2026?" [2] seems kind of crass. These are real issues that have real consequences that affect many real humans (who are no less valuable than me) and people are treating this shit like a fucking game.
I'm not accusing you of that, to be clear, it's just why I find Polymarket to be gross and I'm not sure it should be legal.
[1] https://polymarket.com/event/khamenei-out-as-supreme-leader-...
[2] https://polymarket.com/event/israel-strikes-iran-by-february...
The market already bets on war and death, and has done for probably centuries, only it's mostly institutional players. Seems to me Polymarket just democratizes that, both for bettors and potentially consumers of the probabilities.
I would say the average person is terrible at aggregating media and making predictions, at least this way they can access expert opinion for free.
Of course as yet it's still niche nerd stuff but if I were in Iran, I'd probably find a signal about imminent strikes or future regime change quite useful.
I'm in Israel. If you turn on the TV lately, you will inevitably hear a bunch of talking heads endlessly analyzing every word Trump said, and the movement of various US military apparatus, and then sharing "expert" insights into when there's going to be an escalation.
I can't do anything about this, except decide when it's time to pack my go-bag and leave it near the door so I'm ready to go to the bomb shelter in middle of the night. To that end, polymarket odds are helpful. I'd never bet any money myself, of course.
In related news, I read recently that the IDF is currently investigating some personnel who evidently made money predicting the last Israel-Iran flare up using inside information. Naturally this is quite unlawful.
I don't like it when governments and military contractors and billionaires gamble with human lives either.
Even if you can derive some utility out of the metrics doesn't mean it's good. One can find silver linings in many illegal things but that doesn't imply that it should be legal.
It's not only those groups though, for example a stable food supply requires an efficient commodities market. The utility is not just marginal.
I mean, why is this surprising when you have this
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/inside-trump-familys-...
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