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Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term

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Re: Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term

#91
post #79

I am confused. Are bets considered securities? I thought the CFTC and insider dealing laws applied to securities, not betting.

If they recognize they are betting companies, they have no right to operate in the majority of the states. So, they found the CFTC willing to pretend that these betting contracts are in fact securities, and that is how they can legally operate.

Re: Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term

#92

How could this be insider trading? Polymarket has nothing to do with financial securities. A bet on Polymarket is like trading any other crypto asset.

Polymarket US is only able to operate in the USA because it is being regulated by the CFTC as a securities market. Otherwise, they would have been seen as a gambling site and would have been banned virtually everywhere.

Re: Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If it's unregulated, how are people getting charged with insider trading?

I believe Polymarket wants it to fall under the regulations of cftc as it is implemented like an option/event contract. And cftc says that they don't care about which technology is used. But as far as I now this is the first case it will be tested for real and the views of cftc and a judge may not be the same. I fail to see how it can be classified as insider trading. But, it is till fraud so I'm not sure how much it matters in the end.

Re: Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term

#94
post #86

Why are we wasting government money cracking down on Polymarket betting? The most offensive thing in this article is the government pretending Polymarket bets are securities. Prediction markets provide no benefit to society and don't need to exist.

> (…) provide no benefit to society and don't need to exist. The sounds extremely fascist.

TIL fascism is when you let states regulate gambling because of the public interest and lack of public benefit.

Re: Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term

#96
post #52
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It barely makes sense, though? The idea is that it will surface insider information to the public. That happens only because the insider is financially incentivized to place a bet. But they will only bet if they can win money, and they can only win money if someone is taking the other side of their bet, which necessarily means someone without their insider information. In other words, prediction markets require sucke…

People with insider information often aren't necessarily aware they even have it. "Superforecasters" are often just "good at predicting" moves within a given vertical, because they have expertise and exposure to the trends of that vertical, and are good at making deductions and extrapolating trends. Those people make money from prediction markets just as often as people with true insider info do. And the people they'…

> And the people they're both making money from, are people who think they have enough expertise + exposure to function as superforecasters — and who probably could function as superforecasters, in a market with fewer "sharks" in the pool — but who lose out simply because they were slightly less well-calibrated than whoever they were trading with.

This seems like a complicated way to say "suckers". Of course they don't usually self-identify as such and think they act rationally.

Re: Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term

#97
post #82

I’m completely failing to get outraged here. I think that the person misused Google internal information and deserves termination or other discipline, but I’m struggling to otherwise see the harm in what they did. Is insider trading a crime on prediction markets? Doesn’t it contribute to the accuracy of the pricing of prediction contracts, and therefore is good for the prediction market?

> Is insider trading a crime on prediction markets? Yes, it is both against the CFTC's regulations and against the companies' T&Cs. > Doesn’t it contribute to the accuracy of the pricing of prediction contracts, and therefore is good for the prediction market? That's irrelevant, the purpose of these markets is to provide fair bets for entertainment, not information.

> against the companies' T&Cs

Not a crime, or certainly shouldn't be.

Re: Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term

#98

I was curious how a man in Switzerland gets charged in the US for a placing bets on a site that doesn't allow the US to participate. The short answer seems to be that he stole private information from a US company and used that information to enrich himself. And then got that charge enhanced with things like wire fraud and transacting on systems involving US currency. And another commentor suggests that punishing ins…

The interesting part is that he got charged with insider trading. A few attorneys on bluesky have pointed out that this is a novel use of this law since previously the trading occurred on regulated markets (e.g. SEC or CFTC regulated markets like stock markets and commodities/futures exchanges).

They are regulated. That's why Connecticut, Arizona, and Illinois are being sued by the government. They tried to regulate these markets and the CFTC says they regulate them, not the states.

Re: Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term

#99
post #5

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.

Yup, same with any kind of betting - sport, even draw games. There are obviously stories that someone managed to "game the system", like a man who figured out how to find winning scratch cards (Mohan Srivastava case) or Željko Ranogajec winning in Keno, but the point is that in the first case it was luck + skills, in the second it was overcoming the TOS by creating a lot of fake accounts, that's why the guy had to give his win back (details of the agreement were not revealed).

You bet against skilled people who set the stakes, so, yes, by observing numbers you can win in Keno, but if you comply to the TOS you will not win big money. The only chance to be able to "game the system" is to bet on something that lotteries brokers does not have time to look at, like 3rd Bulgarian bocce league matches.

The problem is that you need to somehow become an expert in 3rd Bulgarian bocce league and the money which are there are generally small.

I was investigating this (again) when AI showed up, as in theory it makes easier some analysis, but the big guys are also using AI.

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