Interesting to see that insider trading is considered illegal after all.
When will the white house insiders see the same fate?
Of course he should be punished but the best lesson here is for bettors. Those who wager on "prediction markets": you are betting against people who have access to more information or can influence the outcome of the wager. Don't waste your money.
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.
That’s the academic theory behind these markets, but there’s no actual value to knowing who the most searched celebrity will be or any of this other garbage. It’s just an unregulated casino with guesses about the popularity of Google searches instead of guessing black or red.
Most searched celebrity, it's arguable.
But do you believe there's no value to intelligence agencies in knowing the probabilities that various countries will be invaded or attacked?
It’s not rare nowadays that speculation on some topic will include the Polymarket rates. Google searches: Maybe not. Maybe that’s just gambling for the fun of it.
You are correct, but you say this like the prediction markets are open about this fact. They aren't and if you ask them they will deny this.
I think they are open about it. John Oliver did a piece on it last month and I recall an interview where the founder of one of these prediction markets shared this as a beneficial effect of the product.
Hmm, not following. The insider trade in this case was small enough to not change the lines meaningfully, no? D4vd's chances of being #1 went from <1% to >99% nearly overnight, was a huge upset.
Polymarket might be different, but conventional Vegas-style lines change with the amount of $$ bet, if the pool is $50M and an insider bets $10k on the long shot, the line isn't moving -- I don't see how insider information can be surfaced in this scenario except after the fact (and only maybe then).
In other words, if the line changes enough to signal insider info, it's not really insider info anymore.
The point is to make money by letting people gamble on the future. What you said is a second order effect of doing the first thing. They should at least be regulated under gambling laws, doesnt make sense without it
What Polymarket says on the topic (https://integrity.polymarket.com/) is that they do not surface insider information and you mustn't trade if you have any.
Because the prediction market community is filled with liars and fraudsters, of course, it does seem to be common knowledge that this restriction isn't meant to be taken seriously, much like Polymarket's fake rule that Americans aren't allowed to use it.
But once you start from the premise that everything prediction markets say about their rules and practices is a lie, why should we believe they provide any genuine signal for anything?
The odds have shown to be largely correct, thanks to people profitably arbitraging away inaccuracies.
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.
Well you either get XKCD 1570 or Jane Street.
Not much in between. The efficient market hypothesis claims many victims.
This is true of all markets.
That's aweful, only senators should be allowed to do that!
If you're playing a poker game and you look around the table and and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you.
- Paul Newman
If you worked at Google for 12 years, it seems pretty irrational to commit this kind of crime for only $1M.
Maybe there’s a chance he can get pardoned before 2029 lol
Anderson Cooper: But predictive markets do rely on someone having some inside information.
Shayne Coplan: Uh-huh. Yeah. I think that people going and having an edge to the market is a good thing. Obviously, you need to curate them and you need to be really clear and stringent on where the line is drawn and, like, sort of ethics and we spend a lot of time on that. But it's sort of an inevitability that this will happen, and there's a lot of benefits from it. And, you know, people will adapt.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/polymarket-ceo-shayne-coplan-on...
“and, like, sort of ethics”
they spent a lot of time on it!
So they hanged a nobody while the person who made even more with white house insider trading announcements by the president goes scotch free?
So now the real bet he lost is salary + time for all those years he is going to prision + lower job for decades after prison. This person bet Millions to get $1M basically and lost both, very rare gambling level lost from smart(used to) person. At least normal gambler loses what they have and some debt.
If he had made less money doing it he probably would have gotten away with it.
Forbes flagged this account back in December and it still took prosecutors months to charge him.
Yes, what did you expect? That’s amazingly fast for federal prosecutors.
Anyone could have run the list of candidate names from the bets through google trends right?
There's an end-of-year Google trends wrapped that the employee pulled off an internal system before it was public.