131–140 of 208 posts
Insider trading is a feature, not a bug, say Shayne and Tarek, stupidly. You can't have this amount of obvious manipulation and expect the average retail consumer to join. Same reason why there hasn't been mass consumer adoption of crypto. People just don't feel safe.
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It absolutely has been! In general prediction markets can’t be “correct” or “incorrect” - for instance if a prediction market says there’s a 60% chance of an event occurring, and it doesn’t occur, was the market right or wrong? Well it’s hard to say - certainly the market said the event was more likely to occur than not, but only just, and who knows? Maybe the event _only just_ occurred, and very nearly didn’t! So ge…
Some of the longshot biases still exists and can't be removed due to technical constraints on the platforms. A lot of times there is a minimum contract price, which effectively means the probability of unlikely events cannot be modeled as lower than 1% or 0.1% or whatever. But there are contracts for events much less likely than that.
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It absolutely has been! In general prediction markets can’t be “correct” or “incorrect” - for instance if a prediction market says there’s a 60% chance of an event occurring, and it doesn’t occur, was the market right or wrong? Well it’s hard to say - certainly the market said the event was more likely to occur than not, but only just, and who knows? Maybe the event _only just_ occurred, and very nearly didn’t! So ge…
Charlie Kirk has a 3% chance of winning a Nobel Peace Prize right now according to Polymarket. He's climbed from 1% since Maduro was arrested. It seems unlikely since Nobels aren't awarded posthumously.
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It absolutely has been! In general prediction markets can’t be “correct” or “incorrect” - for instance if a prediction market says there’s a 60% chance of an event occurring, and it doesn’t occur, was the market right or wrong? Well it’s hard to say - certainly the market said the event was more likely to occur than not, but only just, and who knows? Maybe the event _only just_ occurred, and very nearly didn’t! So ge…
Charlie Kirk has a 3% chance of winning a Nobel Peace Prize right now according to Polymarket. He's climbed from 1% since Maduro was arrested. It seems unlikely since Nobels aren't awarded posthumously.
Anything under 3%/year of time until decision is going to have pretty limited predictive value within that range. Anything starting above that range will end up hitting that floor rather than going to zero because of the difficulty of finding a counterparty.
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You can say you don't want prediction markets and that's fine. It's not responding to my comment though which is saying that if we have prediction markets, the goal should be for them to reveal facts about the world. If you think prediction or stock markets should be "fair" then you have a very bizarre definition of fair (one that's compatible with a game that only rich people can win). Also desiring "fairness" impli…
They aren’t predicting anything if the result is known a priori. Words matter - “prediction markets” just smooths over grift by making it sound reasonable.
If it helps, you can think of the money made as the payment to a confidential informant for information that contributed to a more complete picture of the world. It just happens via a distributed algorithm, using market forces, rather than at the discretion of some intelligence officer or whoever. The more important the information you have to share, the more it moves the market and the bigger your "fee". It's not being a "grifter" to provide true information that moves the market correctly. In fact, this mechanism filters out the actual grifters - you can't make money (in expectation) by providing false information, like traditional informants sometimes can.
This "intelligence gathering" function is the primary goal of a prediction market. It's the only reason it makes sense to even have them. If you turn it into some parlor game where everybody who participates has access to all the same information, then what are we even doing here?
Imagine the massive value of having such a world changing event in advance (the search volume alone probably affected an order of magnitude more in online advertising revenue at least). $430k?! Are you F’ing serious?
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"that a prediction market effectively liberates the directional content of that information by converting it into prices." I can see this, and I guess maybe my issue is with the phrasing of "aggregating" insider information. Because you aren't just aggregating insider info, you are also aggregating non-insider information, but no one (but the insider) knows what is right. Is there different types of prediction market…
I would argue that a "market" in whether it will rain on Saturday isn't really a prediction market, or even a market, at all. It's just a bookmaking operation. The core function of any market, in anything, is price discovery. What's the difference between a "Monday it will rain" market and a NCAAF prop bet on a team's rushing yards? I could argue that DraftKings prop bets are actually more like prediction markets tha…
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It seems to have been outlawed ~13 years ago.
And that certainly seems to have solved the problem...
Regardless of what happens, it is not the case that insider trading isn't illegal for members of Congress, except for some technicalities:
- The act of 2012 does not purport to make insider trading by congressmen illegal. Rather, it purports to make explicit that insider trading by congressmen was illegal before it was passed.
- Insider trading isn't illegal for anyone, in the particular sense that there is no law making it a crime (or any other kind of violation). It exists purely as a construct of the SEC's interpretation of a law that doesn't mention it.
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They aren’t predicting anything if the result is known a priori. Words matter - “prediction markets” just smooths over grift by making it sound reasonable.
The result was not, and could never have been, known a priori. All sorts of random things could have gone wrong with the operation causing the raid to fail and Maduro to remain in power. Trump could have just randomly changed his mind, or postponed the raid to beyond the end of January (the cutoff for the betting market). The person placing the bet was still taking a chance, but it was an informed chance that shifted…
This is such a small amount that either this is one of many accounts the user made in order to mask said activity or this was just a lucky bet (people make stupid lucky bets on hunches all the time). Imagine the massive value of having such a world changing event in advance (the search volume alone probably affected an order of magnitude more in online advertising revenue at least). $430k?! Are you F’ing serious?