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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

#101
post #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 gi…

Most sports betting markets have a degree of unpredictability, and bookmakers will ban sharps (those falling outside the statistical norm or continually hitting lines just before the market moves).

Betting on a final score in most markets is fine.

When betting gets extremely narrow and specific e.g. "Player X will be subbed on for Player Y" it gets morally dubious.

There is a lot of overlap with insurance markets. The incentives have to be aligned (life insurance) with sensible guard rails against abuse (cooling off periods to be covered for suicide)

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

#103
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (…) 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.

Fascism is when seatbelts

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

#106
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.

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…

[deleted]

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

#107

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…

He was arrested in New York, so he was in the US

That doesn't mean he has committed a crime in the US though.

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

#108
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…

Disclaimer: I have not read any literature on the economics of prediction markets, and I know nothing about the mechanics of Polymarket/Kalshi. I would imagine that in theory, everyone thinks they have the best information at the time, something like: House: "Odds that X happens? We'll put $1 on both sides to get it started. 50/50." Someone comes along: "Oh dang, I'm definitely more than 50% confident that X is happe…

Sure but these things are not really "odds" anymore, right? The most searched terms might be a mystery to the general public, but not to the engineers at Google. It gets even murkier when you can influence the outcome. The exact temperature at an airport might be difficult to predict, but if you are able to hold up a hair drier to the sensor for a few minutes you can be pretty sure it won't be cold.

When the other side either has information that makes it not a bet, or if they have means to influence the odds, the best outcome for outsiders is to not play at all.

And of course, the entire conceit relies on the idea that more accurate information to the public is always good and always outweighs the negative externalities. But is it really all that important to the public good what the most searched artist is on Google in a certain year? Or if an announcer will say a certain word during the super bowl?

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

#109

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…

You can charge anyone in the world with anything, the trouble is getting a judge to agree with you and getting your hands on the person you're charging. The first problem doesn't seem to be all that hard in the US (unless the inside traders are part of the US government, of course), the second problem can be as simple as having Google organise an all-expenses-paid team activity to bait the subject into jurisdiction.…

> the second problem can be as simple as having Google organise an all-expenses-paid team activity to bait the subject into jurisdiction.

This actually happens. I know that the FBI once organized an all-expenses-paid trip to a "conference in Hawaii" for certain Chinese chemists it wanted to nab.

The corollary is that if you have reason to expect you're wanted by American Feds, never travel outside China, Russia, and certain European states that are extraordinarily hesitant to extradite to the US (e.g. Ireland).

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

#110
post #73

polymarket should be illegal, challenge me.

The stock market should be illegal too. The stock market is just a prediction market at this point. What value does it create?

> The stock market is just a prediction market at this point.

Not really. But I can get your point.

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