Buying stock in a biotech company with a pre-release drug and betting that the same drug trial will succeed are functionally equivalent, the converse is also true; shorting the stock is identical to betting against the outcome of the trial. Either way, you’re putting money at risk on the outcome of a drug trial.

The only difference is that equity markets are orders of magnitude larger than prediction markets in both depth and liquidity and offer much more incentive for fraud/tampering given the much much higher rewards.

Should we ban biotech companies from raising money in public equity markets since the risk is so much higher than prediction markets?