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

theguardian.com

31–40 of 263 posts

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

#33

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…

This applies to almost everyone working on SaaS; not in all cases, but the absolute majority work on SaaS means creating artificial scarcity in order to extract value from people. It is a fundamentally evil, antisocial, anti human thing to do. If you believe that is okay to restrict access to infinite resources to preserve the status quo you deserve the same place in hell as the people pushing gambling. Don't create…

> Don't create artificial scarcity.

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.

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

#34
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.

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

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that the sole value of prediction markets is to make insider knowledge accessible to the general public, quicker than it normally would. That’s why these platforms saying things like “we will roll out insider trading” is laughable.

>I would argue that their sole value is to make insider knowledge accessible quicker to the general public. 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?

[deleted]

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

#36

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.

couldn't you somehow in theory track the order book to if and when insiders are betting and then copy the trade?

Not knowing who are the insiders and who is the dumb flow is like the fundamental problem of hft

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

#37
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the point of them is they are “truth machines” they give a financial incentive for the insider class to essentially share what they know. The benefit to those outside the insider class are that we now have a better idea of the potential outcome.

This is what their argument is, and personally I think it's a pretty good one. But the main issue is that retail is getting fleeced and lives are being destroyed by gambling, so non-professional investors should not be able to use it. Imo, the upside (some fisherman with insider knowledge betting on the Strait of Hormuz) doesn't outweight the downside (a large-scale societal gambling epidemic[1]). [1] https://www.psy…

What are they sharing that they know though? That someone's getting bombed in an hour? That the government is rampant with corruption?

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.

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

#38

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…

This is the only reasonable point of view to take on the widespread and obviously unethical outbreak of gambling platforms. The fact that it's downboated and towards the bottom is just a reflection of how far the discourse has fallen.

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.

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

#39

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.

potentially, each time.

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

#40

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…

This applies to almost everyone working on SaaS; not in all cases, but the absolute majority work on SaaS means creating artificial scarcity in order to extract value from people. It is a fundamentally evil, antisocial, anti human thing to do. If you believe that is okay to restrict access to infinite resources to preserve the status quo you deserve the same place in hell as the people pushing gambling. Don't create…

This is pseudo-intellectual drivel. Creating value and then charging for it is not creating “artificial scarcity”, any more than doing nothing is creating “artificial scarcity” by absence of value. There was no “infinite resource” that just happened to exist before the work was put in to create it. And creating value is - almost by definition - completely orthogonal to zero sum games.
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