Anyway, one thing I don’t understand yet is how new markets are created. They aren’t user generated, so how did an “Iran strike” market exist to begin with?
Having the US presidents kids as multimillion dollar investors in the platforms and on the advisory board of one them would be a good place to look
These markets are global with global demand and many of the insiders are on the receiving end of American foreign policy. If an Iranian with a starlink sees a b-2 spirit fly over their house that information will find its way to somebody who will profit from that knowledge, it's just part of the new information economy.
You're claiming the U.S. government is impotent against holding Polymarket to account?
> These markets are global
The trades in question are bets on Polymarket and Intercontinental Exchange Brent oil futures. These are well within the remit of American law enforcement.
I personally don’t know any, and I worked at one of the biggest HFT firms for a few years.
The losing side(s) of these positions are heavily hedged, and are happily making money on volume and volatility. (And making record profits this year)
Math wins over your feels every time.
Stephen Miller and Charlie Kirk were pretty clear their sides whole philosophy is take and never give back. They learned it was OK not from their parents but gen pop sitting on their hands.
The entire economy is Las Vegas now; only the (white) house wins
You need centralized regulation to make it work.
(And I do not see how this first-order viewpoint is problematic, precisely. It’s the second-order consequences of people making the currently-considered-unlikely decision in order to cash in on a bet that I have an issue with.)
Because it won't be prosecuted by 2029 but could be afterwards
Personally I think it's a bigger problem when the President sues his own government for billions and then orders them to pay it out
Because -that- is not an official act. It could be prosecuted but no-one will touch it even after 2029
Unless they're absolute morons, the people doing insider trading for large sums of money will have already built a strong alibi.
If you have perfect opsec, sure, you'll just waste a few years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in court. If you texted a friend, or told a friend who then texted a friend, or traded too soon to receiving privileged information, you're probably fucked.
> Unless they're absolute morons
At least in securities, the dirty secret is most insider traders are in Congress and/or morons.
My theory is they are banking on preemptive presidential pardons in Dec 2028.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-plans-to-pardo...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
[1] https://www.criminallawlibraryblog.com/preemptive-pardons-co...
In other nations you can illegally sell arms to Iran in order to illegally evade congress's attempts to stop you supplying money to terrorists, illegally shred evidence and lie to congress under oath about it all and get a job as a pundit on Fox News.
An employee with access to Truth Social's backend can in theory do this by reading the tweets he's writing before he sends them.
Traders place $760M bet on falling oil ahead of Hormuz announcement
because if it did you would print money by following occam.
I predict these will be banned when someone finally uses them as an "assassination market".
[1] https://www.cultivatelabs.com/crowdsourced-forecasting-guide
The benefit to those outside the insider class are that we now have a better idea of the potential outcome.
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/inside-out-outside-i...
The first seems arguably treasonous. And the latter seems directly supported and funded by these "prediction markets".
If the argument is that prediction markets are truth machines, their social function seems to be support crime on a massive scale and get away with it.
If we take a completely utilitarian and amoral viewpoint, the insiders are selling their material, non-public information. The rest of the market participants are buying. From the latter's utilitarian perspective the former are providing a valuable service and getting paid for it. I'm pretty sure there was a legal term for such sales activity...
The only people playing fair are those who don't know how to cheat well enough.
That’s why these platforms saying things like “we will roll out insider trading” is laughable.
Is anyone using AI to track these audacious and large bets? Seems like you could actually do this to tell which ones are insider info and which are just stupid random bets?
I think it's just that we create useful tools: futures, the pre-emptive pardon, and so on. Then people figure out how to use those tools to enrich themselves in ways we did not anticipate. It's just a question of how we fix our machinery in this cat and mouse game or if it is fixable at all.
Don't create artificial scarcity. Don't play zero sum games.
Maybe this is just my lack of understanding in how most SaaS companies operate... But to me making software that people find valuable and charging them for that is not inherently immoral. Surely that is the majority of cases?
The original idea behind SaaS is to align the incentives of the customers and the software company.
Historically software companies made money on selling upgrades. This meant bug fixes were not a priority, and security fixes were something companies got shamed into doing.
SaaS fixes that incentive problem. With reliable ongoing revenue a company can keep software patched and updated and doesn't have to cram a bunch of new shiny marketable features in just to make a huge sale every 3 or 4 years, while engineers try and add whatever bug fixes they can after the shiny new features have been polished off.
It also means software companies don't have boom or bust cycles with hiring. Funding stays consistent, and so does staffing. It makes the financials much easier to manage. Companies used to hire a bunch of temp employees in the run up to a release.
Ongoing release cycles also led to better software engineering practices. More automated tests, reproducible builds, better version control systems, and a lot more things that we take for granted now days.
There are obvious downsides to SaaS as well, but the original idea was good.
Nah. You know what the answer is? Get to a mental and physical state where you need very little. Right now the only way to win is not to play.
Granted, maybe I should be less surprised given the fact that this is all being posted on the promotional website of a technology-focused private equity fund, but it's disappointing nonetheless.
But if they _are_ rational, eg, a zimbawean inflation nightmare, then if you're not trying to "escape the permanent underclass" then _you_ are the irrational person.
So ignoring all politics, we're really dealing with a zeitgeist of people who think wealth inequality is endless, and the only way to survive is to lobster bucket and YOLO every chance to gamble.
I bring this up because we assume the trading is coming from insiders but I wonder if the parties behind this have baked in a layer similar to my story above.
To close this back to your comment, and I don’t have an answer here: is knowing who the insiders are and acting on that a crime? If you did know and didn’t report them, are you breaking a law? Or worse, you reported it to the deaf ears of a regulator that are focused elsewhere or are under resourced to respond now?
it's legal to follow FBI cars and see who they raid so as to make trades. you could even have a hedge fund specialized on this. it's called alternative data
you can even be a regular employer of a public company and trade based on information sent on internal emails.
the only thing illegal is to be a designated insider - typically a restricted group of people with access to sensitive information
You absolutely cannot.
Sure. But these aren't trades in "the oil market." They're bets on Polymarket and a specific oil-futures exchange.
Need a strong source for this. The size (and regulatory) disconnect between the two would seem to make making markets in both a bit silly.
https://x.com/peterjliu/status/2024901585806225723
But there is still the problem of knowing which new trades the insiders made before the bet is settled (maybe solved by being an insider of the prediction market), and also since prediction markets need money on both sides (you are betting against other people, not the 'house') when the insiders make their buy they probably eat up most of or all of the action on the other side.
Gambling should be judged as any other vice - people get something out of it (rush, hope, whatever) not by rational money allocation standards.