An account trading under the username “Magamyman” made more than $553,000 placing bets on the prediction market Polymarket that Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would be out of power just before an Israeli strike killed him on Saturday.
…Under U.S. commodity trading laws, making trades based on death and war are illegal, since those kinds of bets create a financial reward for violence, human suffering and geopolitical instability.
I still think you’re missing the point here.
Yes, insiders swoop in especially when the odds are not “reflecting reality”… because the profit motive is there. Which means that spikes in prediction markets are valuable information.
I’m not looking at it as a participant, I’m looking at it as a source of information. Crooked money, straight money, when there is money to made someone with information and money is going to take advantage, tipping us off.
It can be a degenerate cesspool of gambling and insider manipulation and also the bleeding edge of predictive technology… no reason it can’t be both.