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Comment by alphazard | Hacker News Reader

> Regardless, polymarket seems to be on balance corrupting, by monetizing and normalizing use of inside information,

This is a common take on "inside information", but for most people this opinion is totally unaligned with their own goals. The people who benefit from "no insider trading" in any market, are a small group of active traders, some institutional, some not.

For literally everyone else, insider trading is a net win. Insider trading improves price discovery. If you passively invest then you benefit from the price being more accurate when whatever fraction of your paycheck goes into the market.

I don't know your own situation, maybe you are one of those few traders who needs information to spread a certain way in order to make money. For everyone else, don't be fooled into promoting an idea against your own interests.

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In fact, a lot of people claim that the main point of prediction markets is to give the general public better predictions, and insider participation actually helps with that.

This is missing the primary reasons insider trading is bad, which are that it's an information theft incentive against employers, and worse, that it's a sabotage incentive.

I'm honestly puzzled by this take.

Clearly the people who benefit from insider trading in any market are those doing the insider trading, not all market participants.

The argument is not that Polymarket et al are "insider trading only" but rather that insider trading in those markets is not regulated so people can get ahead of trades based on confidential information and make a lot of money off of all the suckers gambling their money away on ridiculously frivolous bets.

If you don't see the problem with that, you're complicit, misinformed or brainwashed.

A similar issue is that of market manipulation, since many markets in these platforms can be directly manipulated by participants in manners as easily as spamming some words on an earnings call.

> If you don't see the problem with that, you're complicit, misinformed or brainwashed.

The problem that I imagine you see with this, is that it doesn't conform to a particular, special, notion of fairness that you think the market should have.

Informed parties have an edge over uninformed parties. This edge is "unfair" if you believe the market should be a lottery. The market is designed to pay people with accurate beliefs, by taking from people with inaccurate beliefs. Everyone's belief is valued based on its accuracy, and the market is fair in that sense. Fairness is actually irrelevant to the societal good the market provides, which is to produce accurate prices. A third party, who doesn't participate, shouldn't care about the market being "fair", they should care about it giving good information.

> A similar issue is that of market manipulation, since many markets in these platforms can be directly manipulated by participants in manners as easily as spamming some words on an earnings call.

If you are betting on what a person will say, and the person knows about the market, that is a chaotic system. If you bid the price away from max entropy then you deserve the outcome.

This has nothing to do with fairness of outcomes but with defrauding naive investors of their money.

For context, I'm a former Investment Banker so this isn't coming from a place of naivete but an informed view. I did have to study SEC regulations for those FINRA examinations....

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