James Surowiecki has been dismissive about prediction markets actually meeting the criteria for the Wisdom of the Crowds.

I'll leave this here, Donald Trump Jr got a free stake in Kalshi. https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/options/articles/donald-tr...

It lasts for now, it won’t survive when the political pendulum swings back. “Make hay grifting while the grifters shine.” is the current MO. “Temporary economic strip mining operation.”

Hedging is not insider trading. Insider trading is trading based on material non-public information in breach of a duty or obtained through fraud. In that sense, it's more of a principal-agent problem.

Also -- hedging is generally not done based on material non-public information, but rather to guard against known risks. Joe the farmer sells a bunch of wheat futures when he plants his wheat, not because he thinks the price will go down, but rather because if it does he goes bankrupt and he'd prefer to accept a known rate-of-return now.

If you and the buyer know about the risks then you’re not making a trade based on material non public information, are you?

If you make a hedging trade while having material knowledge that you withhold from the counterparty… well, that sounds like it could be edging towards fraud. Like taking out life insurance while hiding a medical condition.

But sure, it’s not against the law to do business with a sucker, so there’s degrees here.

Just for context that’s not quite accurate. There certainly is a distinction in the rule versus securities markets, which I know is what you mean.

But it’s more accurate to say participants can trade on lawfully obtained material nonpublic information absent some independent duty not to use it, which is much narrower than saying insider trading is generally legal.

Exactly. Pit mine sees who's buying what and is worried copper will go down. Datacenter people see who's inking deals and are worried it's gonna go up. They both need to get big fancy loans from their bankers to execute their upcoming projects. The bankers won't like to see unbounded risk on their balance sheets. A futures contract exists to solve this problem.

Not that this excuses some of the absurd stuff that goes on on the online betting platforms...

Its not just the broadcasts are advertisements. Its completely engrained in every professional sports league now. They now all have some kind of multi-year contracts with casino's, betting platforms and prediction markets. This is way beyond advertising now. Our local sports talk show has an hour long show that precedes the pre-game that is 100% all about NFL gambling for Sunday's games.

Not only are you seeing the advertisements for these platforms and their betting apps, you're having a coordinated focus on actively pushing it in a myriad of other ways as well.

It's also an obvious and cynical regulatory dodge. Prediction markets make the bulk of their profit from sports betting.

Predication markets are literally causing people to start wildfires across the globe, I thought it was just a USA thing going on, but it's global.

Where is that "less than 1%" figure coming from or did you just pull that out from you-know-where?

And alcohol has always been highly accessible. I have 5 stores within a 5 minute walk of me that I can get it from, and that's not to mention all of the restaurants and bars within that same radius.

Addiction is addiction. Alcohol is one object of that addiction. Sports betting can be another. Porn, food, drugs, etc.

What's to say sports betting addiction won't become as severe as alcohol now that it's becoming more accessible to the public?

The stock market isn't fundamentally a gamble. Spending money to buy a share of a company's future dividends is a sound way to invest money and earn a return on it.

The problem with the stock market is when there aren't enough new companies going public to soak up the spigot of all the capital that people want to invest, leading average P/E ratios to increase over time. There is too much money chasing too few earnings. When the underlying fundamentals don't match up, then all that investors are doing is speculating that someone else will be the bigger fool and buy from them at an even more unreasonable price - and that is a gamble.

Yeah, we hate that too man. It's just not the topic at hand.

Is the stock market able to distinguish cancerous vs non-cancerous growth?

Yes. It feels more and more like a casino as time goes by.

You've been able to gamble on your mobile device for 100 years in the UK?

Modern gambling isn't you talking to a bookie and putting down $100 on your favorite team. That should still be legal. Phone apps which learn your behavior, your favorite teams, the offers you are likely to accept, the time of day that you're most likely to make a bet, etc etc and use that to barrage you with notifications, "free" plays, high paying parlays with horrible odds, should not be.

Society bears the downsides of gambling and gambling addiction, while the casinos gather all of the upside.

Finally... https://www.thalamos.co.uk/resources/gambling-addiction-rela...

> NHS gambling clinics have experienced a rise of 130% in referrals in a year, leading to a large increase in the number of support locations.

Seems like the UK is also experiencing a large increase in problems from modern gambling systems.

Sports gambling is controlled by FTC in the US. Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket found a loophole where they can run gambling operations under CFTC and and not be controlled by FTC. There needs to be some legislative actions from the Congress to close the loophole.

America is not the UK and its citizens are not capable of regulating themselves in the face of this sort of exploitation.

Imagine two siblings, one who can handle the freedom of choosing their own bedtime and one who cannot.

> Prediction markets are a wonderful idea

Yeah, it's just like being able to take an insurance policy on other people's lives. It's a wonderful idea for all of 15 minutes until people start getting murdered.

> bare minimum of regulation

No amount of regulation will solve the issue when what you can take insurance on is not regulated.

Prediction markets are to insurance the same as crypto is to banking: a speedrun of all the frauds that happened in the past until the perpetrators are sent to jail or regulated so heavily that they are virtually identical to what they were supposed to disrupt.

"a wonderful idea" -- some hyperbole there.

I am trying to say that they cannot claim that this deal will “threaten our journalistic independence”. It is just kinda funny (and sad) that they claim that while only 32% of U.S. adults said they trust The New York Times as a source of news.

https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/feature/news-media-tr...

How did Citizen's United affect journalism?

To me, the rules on how large a media conglomerate could get being changed in favor of allowing the conglomerate to grow even larger did some heavy lifting. Journalism publishers no longer have to compete since their all owned by the same limited number of owners.

How does this happen with an online app? I understand how it happens when you place a bet with the local bookie.

I think a good toy example here could be a market on a coinflip. Let's say heads pays out $1 and tails pays out $0, and people can buy and sell contracts that resolve this way. Naively, people might think that this is a 50/50 outcome, so if anyone wanted to buy or sell this contract for some reason, they'd likely be able to find someone to trade with them around the price of 50 cents.

Now, say that you somehow knew that this coin wasn't a fair coin, and instead was weighted 55% to fall on heads, 45% tails. Then, you would be happy buying these contracts for 50 cents -- given the contract pays out $1 if the coin lands on heads, and you know there's a 55% chance of heads, the expected price for the contract is 55 cents, and you make 5 cents in expectancy.

So, if you had information about the "fair value" of this contract, telling you that the price should be 55 cents, you'd be incentivized to buy the contract at prices below 55 cents. If the contract was trading at any price other than 55 cents, then, from your perspective, the price would be incorrect. And if the price is incorrect, then you'd be able to make money trading: buying for prices below 55 cents and selling at prices above 55 cents. And finally, as a result of your trading, you'd provide one-sided demand to the market, pushing the price closer to the actual correct price.

From this simple mechanism, wherein everyone who has information is incentivized to make money on their information by trading, prices start getting pushed to accurately reflect the aggregate of the information that everyone possesses! So in markets, there is a profit incentive to provide information, and this makes prices more accurate.

Finally, I think a common misconception is that prediction markets are sometimes wrong, as events priced at low probabilities sometimes happen. For example, in the 2024 election, Trump was trading at probabilities below 50%, but he still won! However, this is conflating present information about the future with future results. Given the earlier example about the biased 55% coin -- before we flip the coin, the best thing we can possibly say about the future really just is that there's a 55% chance of heads and 45% chance of tails. If we then flip the coin and it lands on tails, that doesn't mean we were incorrect -- it was just the best statement about the future that we could have possibly made.

Prediction markets -- or really any price system -- aggregate the best available information about the future. If you can confidently state that they are wrong -- that their best available information about the future is inaccurate -- then you should be trading and making money.

Does that clear things up a bit for you? It's a longer response, but I think it might address some of the confusion that you (or anyone else) might have regarding what people actually mean when they say that these prices predict the future.

Again, this union doesn't seem to take a position on gambling at all in this statement