Traders placed over $1B in perfectly timed bets on the Iran war

hdhdhsjsbdh

Yet more evidence of the rapid disassembly of the social contract and our collective ethics, aided of course by unregulated tech. If you work for – or are involved in the funding of – these unregulated gambling and insider trading platforms, you should be ashamed of yourself. Your greed and lack of concern for the health of the human world you live in is sickening. You can get bag after bag but it will never fill the void in your soul.

cineticdaffodil

Now of cocourse there are bots circling watching for insider trades. Which you can "milk" by pretending to insider trade and then hedging a bet against them. A whole eco system of scoundrels

ck2

What's the statute of limitations on such things? 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

echelon

What value do prediction markets give to anyone not in the insider trading class? I predict these will be banned when someone finally uses them as an "assassination market".

beaviskhan

You'd have to be spectacularly stupid to bet on these kinds of things without having insider knowledge, because you ought to know good and damn well by now that the people with insider knowledge are DEFINITELY betting on them.

sieste

Maybe a superhuman AI? /s

mrtksn

I wonder if this means that in a true free market betting is actually impossible as extra-gaming structures like those spontaneously emerge. You need centralized regulation to make it work.

reactordev

Prediction Markets require insider trading to function... how do people not know this? It's a setup from day one. If you have the knowledge, you're going to cash in, if you don't have the knowledge, you are throwing your money away.

wslh

I would be careful about attributing all of this to ordinary insider trading. Another plausible explanation is that some activity could come from state linked or intelligence adjacent actors, where the goal is not only profit but also testing or exploiting prediction markets as an auxiliary information channel.

reenorap

Without them talking about how much people LOST, this entire article is meaningless. With the advent of 0DTE options which dominate options trading, the fact that the notional number of people who made money makes sense because so many more people have lost money.

outlore

There’s a recent Patrick Boyle video which puts it aptly: prediction markets are a wealth transfer from retail investors to trading algorithms and people with security clearances. Anyway, one thing I don’t understand yet is how new markets are created. They aren’t user generated, so how did an “Iran strike” market exist to begin with?

ChrisArchitect

Related: Traders place $760M bet on falling oil ahead of Hormuz announcement https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47812385

yalogin

It’s all manipulation and everyone knows it but when the voices are coming from inside the house, who’s going to investigate? If anything every tech company in the whole flow is going to support and add custom flows for them - “to get on their good side”

Stevvo

These articles always focus on "Yes" bets. An insider betting "No" might get by completely unnoticed.

int32_64

It's deeply American how so many of these articles about Kalshi or Polymarket frame the issue as something that can be solved on the American end with the stroke of a pen, especially in a multipolar world where American sanctions increasingly fail. 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.

tezza

Wait until they find out how many people place perfectly timed horse racing bets on the winning horse, JUST before the start of the race. 100% of them knew to back the winning horse

hereme888

Good for those who made the money. I would have done so had I had such insider info, as long as it didn't compromise any operation.

slg

Say whatever you want about the merits of prediction markets. But I just don't see a way those benefits outweigh the societal dangers of these constant reminders that people in or close to power can freely profit from their positions in the ways the rest of the population can't. There's always talk about the dangers of disincentivizing job creators, but what happens when a society routinely disincentives job havers in this way? We're just getting a constant barrage of information telling us that if we show up to our job and simply work as we're expected that we're stooges who won't get ahead. You'll need to look for your own individual scheme, ethics be damned, if you just want to keep up with the rest of the population. That's not healthy on an individual level or cumulatively at a societal level.

ckemere

Why can’t the markets just forbid transactions that happen within 48 hours of resolution?

elAhmo

It’s not perfectly timed bets, it’s called insider trading. Just one more thing this administration has brought into mainstream.