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

theguardian.com

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

#141

Post by le-mark »

yalogin wrote: post #74

It’s all manipulation and everyone knows it but when the voices are coming from inside the house, who’s going to investigate? If anything every tech company in the whole flow is going to support and add custom flows for them - “to get on their good side”

There’s something deeply wrong with the executive branch controlling law enforcement and who gets prosecuted in the US. Jack Smith had him dead to rights in two cases (read the indictments they are water tight) that his attorney general then dismissed. It’s a travesty. Thank you “let the courts handle it” McConnel.

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

#142

Post by Supermancho »

anonymars wrote: post #108
Supermancho wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"cannot" here meaning it's likely to be prosecuted, not that you cannot . You absolutely can.

This interpretation is incredibly unlikely. The first and third paragraphs discuss legality, but the middle one was merely talking about likelihood of prosecution? Even then it would be inaccurate: the regulators are not too stupid to put two and two together that you work for a company and got incredibly lucky with your trade

To be clear, I was responding about trading on internal communications, not specifically a raid. The practice of using internal communication to guide trading runs contrary to most company policies. I happen to have worked at a company where this kind of practice was both acknowledged and openly discussed. It was a strange place.

> the regulators are not too stupid to put two and two together that you work for a company and got incredibly lucky with your trade

You’re implying some specific combination of factors, but it’s not clear what you mean. What qualifies as "timing"? Around earnings, when trading volume is highest or just around some event? And what exactly counts as "lucky"?

Why would regulators scrutinize a sub-$25k purchase of my own company’s stock? That concern feels overstated. Granted, I’m not a lawyer. In practice I can place a trade at any time. If someone is routinely making $20k–$30k transactions, that alone is unlikely to trigger scrutiny.

The claim that you "absolutely cannot do this" is simply incorrect. I stand by that.

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

#143

Post by boringg »

airstrike wrote: post #123
slg wrote: post #100

Say whatever you want about the merits of prediction markets. But I just don't see a way those benefits outweigh the societal dangers of these constant reminders that people in or close to power can freely profit from their positions in the ways the rest of the population can't. There's always talk about the dangers of disincentivizing job creators, but what happens when a society routinely disincentives job havers i…

> Say whatever you want about the merits of prediction markets Go on, I'll wait for those "merits"

Lining the pockets of the vcs who funded them and the other insiders. Nothing but an extractionary industry with no underlying benefit.

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

#145

Post by SJMG »

colechristensen wrote: post #104
slg wrote: post #100

Say whatever you want about the merits of prediction markets. But I just don't see a way those benefits outweigh the societal dangers of these constant reminders that people in or close to power can freely profit from their positions in the ways the rest of the population can't. There's always talk about the dangers of disincentivizing job creators, but what happens when a society routinely disincentives job havers i…

I think the bigger risk is changing major decisions (like war) based on the profitability of bets. Forget about drone war doctrine, if you're an adversary just place absurdly large bets which incentivize the opposition to do what you want. (i.e. bet so you "lose" the bet when the enemy changes their posture to gain the profit). Politics is already full of these pay to play incentives but now anyone with enough cash c…

This kind of nation-level hedging has been talked about for years in betting market-aware communities. It's honestly a much better use than fleecing nobodies with insider knowledge.

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

#146

Post by mothballed »

jaredklewis wrote: post #134
slg wrote: post #100

Say whatever you want about the merits of prediction markets. But I just don't see a way those benefits outweigh the societal dangers of these constant reminders that people in or close to power can freely profit from their positions in the ways the rest of the population can't. There's always talk about the dangers of disincentivizing job creators, but what happens when a society routinely disincentives job havers i…

The current setup does sort of seem like a tax on being stupid. Why would any non-insider participate in these markets? You’re just asking to get screwed. Though it’s not that different from the stock market, where the folks at WSB happily give their money to Citadel, Jane Street, and friends, because every once a while, one of them hits it big after going all in that the ball lands on green. Gambling is a hell of a…

As a hedge. Say you own real estate in UAE, and you note that insurance does not cover acts of war. Betting on something like "Iran Bombs Dubai" creates some form of real estate insurance for you.

Even if you suppose my example is bad, you should be able to envision some case where such hedge is helpful.

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

#147

Post by lesuorac »

Tade0 wrote: post #139
slg wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The oil trade structure actually does make sense, because this is how you buy oil, or really any commodity that takes so much space and weight. You order it ahead of time, then if you hold till the contract settles you are allowed to pick it up from the place and in the way designated in the contract specification. In fact you are obliged to pick it up, that's why prices can go negative in exceptional situations. Pr…

Airlines in particular prefer to have a predictable price of fuel, whatever it might be, so they buy futures.

Do they? Afaik, they don't [1].

> WONG: However, Gerry says most of the major airlines in the U.S. eventually soured on fuel hedging. One reason - the Wall Street transaction fees to make these hedges got expensive.

> WOODS: Plus, Gerry says the airlines found that they could make money the old-fashioned way by raising prices. Today, none of the major airlines in the U.S. are hedging.

Hedging is one of those things that sounds cool but then when your service is x% more expensive than a competitor and you lose customers you just stop doing it. It's kinda like being on AWS; when everybody has an outage together nobody asks "oh what can be done differently".

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2026/03/27/nx-s1-5759203/fuel-hedging-on...

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

#148

Post by kasey_junk »

These headlines always irritate me because they use notional value for sensationalism. The 950m notional is if they were paying for a price move of the whole thing from $0 in cash. But these are highly levered futures contracts. And you are getting in and out at 2 price differences that are close to each other.

It’s still shocking corruption and absolutely should be enraging. But that’s because it’s a 10s of millions dollar trade. Not a billion dollar one.

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

#149

Post by jamal-kumar »

tenahu wrote: post #114
jamal-kumar wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government leaders and political policy advisors, intelligence agencies, hedge funds & quants, and large corporations doing crowdsourced forecasting for sure. That's probably why they haven't just been made illegal - the very policy makers are utilizing the data streams from this to predict the near-future to a decent degree. Companies like Cultivate Labs [1] go into the maths of it all but if you prefer videos Hyper…

Thanks for the links, very interesting.

It's pretty much the same math behind weather prediction. Very roughly speaking, they have models to rank predictors (Or say, weather forecasting models) on accuracy and then figure out where the best predictors are all agreeing and the worst predictors are all saying the opposite of those best predictors.

It's worth noting that these prediction markets just run on blockchains, so pretty much anyone with the mathematical and technical knowhow can analyze those data streams and do much better than your average degenerate gambler who has no idea what they're getting into

Key is reconstructing the historical data from the smart contracts that run these things, that's a bit of a challenge but last I checked there's some companies which have figured this out [1]

[1] https://www.probalytics.io

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

#150

Post by fyredge »

Tade0 wrote: post #139
slg wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The oil trade structure actually does make sense, because this is how you buy oil, or really any commodity that takes so much space and weight. You order it ahead of time, then if you hold till the contract settles you are allowed to pick it up from the place and in the way designated in the contract specification. In fact you are obliged to pick it up, that's why prices can go negative in exceptional situations. Pr…

Airlines in particular prefer to have a predictable price of fuel, whatever it might be, so they buy futures.

That still does not satisfactorily answer the question though, why don't they just sign a purchase order with N month lead time? That still gives a well defined price ahead of time.
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