That's sort of the point of prediction markets: they surface insider information by allowing people to profit off of it. The benefit is to people watching the prices, who can then use that information to make better decisions ahead of the answer being revealed to the public. It's not necessarily to market participants, who need to be aware of who else is trading the market and have a credible reason to believe they have better information.

Yup, same with any kind of betting - sport, even draw games. There are obviously stories that someone managed to "game the system", like a man who figured out how to find winning scratch cards (Mohan Srivastava case) or Željko Ranogajec winning in Keno, but the point is that in the first case it was luck + skills, in the second it was overcoming the TOS by creating a lot of fake accounts, that's why the guy had to give his win back (details of the agreement were not revealed).

You bet against skilled people who set the stakes, so, yes, by observing numbers you can win in Keno, but if you comply to the TOS you will not win big money. The only chance to be able to "game the system" is to bet on something that lotteries brokers does not have time to look at, like 3rd Bulgarian bocce league matches.

The problem is that you need to somehow become an expert in 3rd Bulgarian bocce league and the money which are there are generally small.

I was investigating this (again) when AI showed up, as in theory it makes easier some analysis, but the big guys are also using AI.

We would be much better off as society if bettors and gamblers actually learned from their lessons. Unfortunately that's not how it works.

Also, at least on Polymarket, beware of those who can influence the settlement of the wager, which may settle not in concordance with the actual outcome in reality.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1jki1lj/pol...

The real money is in providing liquidity if you don't have insider knowledge.

That's a very naive take of someone who never professionally traded. There are liquidity providing, market making trading strategies that work in absence of insider information.

This is true of all markets.

The interesting part is that he got charged with insider trading. A few attorneys on bluesky have pointed out that this is a novel use of this law since previously the trading occurred on regulated markets (e.g. SEC or CFTC regulated markets like stock markets and commodities/futures exchanges).

You can charge anyone in the world with anything, the trouble is getting a judge to agree with you and getting your hands on the person you're charging.

The first problem doesn't seem to be all that hard in the US (unless the inside traders are part of the US government, of course), the second problem can be as simple as having Google organise an all-expenses-paid team activity to bait the subject into jurisdiction.

If the basis for their charges really is just that he traded in dollars, then this is yet another example why nobody should trust Americans and their currency when it comes to trade. I hope they can come up with something better than that.

US charged and arrested a man in Venezuela so...

He was arrested in New York, so he was in the US

And the progeny of someone whose name rhymes with 'Thwump'.

Well, you see, the house always wins

> Is insider trading a crime on prediction markets?

Yes, it is both against the CFTC's regulations and against the companies' T&Cs.

> Doesn’t it contribute to the accuracy of the pricing of prediction contracts, and therefore is good for the prediction market?

That's irrelevant, the purpose of these markets is to provide fair bets for entertainment, not information.

  I’m completely failing to get outraged here.

  I think that the person that a/b/c deserves prison or other discipline, but I’m struggling to otherwise see the harm in what they did. Is insider trading a crime on prediction markets? Doesn’t it contribute to the accuracy of the pricing of prediction contracts, and therefore is good for the prediction market?

b. lobbied the president to attack Iran

c. neglected critical aid spreading Ebola

By the way there are reasons why we ban sport people from betting or insiders to disclose their (and relatives) trades to the sec: incentives.

It seems like the prediction market crowd cannot understand the economics of incentives and their harmful consequences.

Even though we already see the harm in the real world with journalists receiving death threats for reporting news or randoms tampering with meteorological equipment to win bets.

And that's only what we know.

Isn't that stock market a prediction market?

> (…) provide no benefit to society and don't need to exist.

The sounds extremely fascist.

> If you worked at Google for 12 years, it seems pretty irrational to commit this kind of crime for only $1M.

Kinda? It's not like people making an order of magnitude less don't get busted for crimes where they're stealing an order of magnitude less.

If they recognize they are betting companies, they have no right to operate in the majority of the states. So, they found the CFTC willing to pretend that these betting contracts are in fact securities, and that is how they can legally operate.

He was Staff-level as well. That's minimum $500k a year or more. And tenure often grows pay disproportionately at Google. That's easily $20 million lost.

You're making a bold assumption that this is the first time they're making money off of these bets.

“and, like, sort of ethics”

Trump's family and their cronies have a free pardon waiting for them the day they get convicted. Better wait until the next regime shift, spending money on trying to prosecute the insiders now is just a waste of everyone's time and money. So far Trump has pardoned the 1/6 insurrectionists without any consequences, pardoning someone for a little white collar crime is barely going to hit the news cycle.

Yes, what did you expect? That’s amazingly fast for federal prosecutors.

Polymarket US is only able to operate in the USA because it is being regulated by the CFTC as a securities market. Otherwise, they would have been seen as a gambling site and would have been banned virtually everywhere.

There's an end-of-year Google trends wrapped that the employee pulled off an internal system before it was public.