Allegations of insider trading over prediction-market bets tied to Iran conflict
morningstar.com
morningstar.com
This is also true with traditional stock markets, except that laundering real money is much harder to do alone. In the real world an assassin can't really involve more people as those people would realize they are loose ends since they have a get-out-of-jail card in turning on you.
The markets could get ahead of this by stipulating that a resolution via murder will always lead to resolution at prices at a time prior to the death. This would technically incentivize a potential assassin to commit a deniable murder, but if they succeed it won't be the market's [PR] problem.
But there might be an incentive to freeze the price? I think polymarkets should be banned.
No idea if they've somehow been legalized as a rider to a 10,000 page appropriations bill, or if they're already illegal in the US.
Personally I don't like banning vices. Regulation is much better. So I always use the ban on selling organs to anchor the "yeah, sometimes things just need to be banned" side. Online gambling in general, but particularly these prediction markets, just really don't sit right. I can see perhaps how gaming gambling could be effectively regulated(I don't believe it is currently), but these prediction markets..
We can go on and on (I can give you 7 million other examples too, this is easy one), the entire prediction market is meant for idiots to give their money to non-idiots that are rigging the whole thing (without any regulation).
Do you think it is acceptable that someone may have altered their behavior due to the outcome of a bet on attacking Iran?
I bet $1B that Julius Caesar will not be killed on March 13 with nightshade.
I bet $1B that Julius Caesar will not be killed on March 13 with hemlock.
...
I bet $1B that Julius Caesar will not be killed on March 15 by being stabbed to death in the back.
...
I bet $1B that Julius Caesar will not be killed on March 17 with nightshade.
I bet $1B that Julius Caesar will not be killed on March 17 with hemlock.
...
1,000,000 automatically generated bets omitted.
Sure, people can bet some cash and attempt to get a cut of the assassin's money. Traditionally, you put that cash back into the pot, so (for all but the successful event) it goes to the assassin's pockets.
The first-order issue is that the assassin needs to bet a bunch of cash to out-bet the zero-information speculators. Some Roman trillionaire could bet $100K that the assassination would happen for each slot, drowning out the cash of the actual assassin. Of course, this would cost them $100B if placing bets are free, and there are a million scenarios.
The next big problem arises if people can watch for movements on a given position in real time. The market can fix that by running the feed on, say, a 1 hour delay. So, while they're sharpening their knives at the Senate, the Roman congress-critters can each put in a bet via cell phone.
Of course, then the (totally ethical, I'm sure) people running the assassination market could siphon money off by spying on the realtime feed. This tertiary problem is solved by making sure those people are generally well-known, giving them an incentive to not piss off assassins.
This was the primary use case for polymarkets before they were banned, and the reason they were banned.
(Well, secondary use case, and secondary reason for the ban. The first was stealing retail investors' retirement funds, and a series of financial panics that led to the Great Depression and creation of the SEC.)
Do you want to bet what I'll eat for dinner next?
Note that this isn't about making the market "fair" for other participants but about ensuring confidential information remains confidential (especially relevant in the context of national defense).
But all they are doing is updating a financial instrument that suggests an increased likelihood, and getting massive bank for not providing the information that would make everyone else bet the same way.
That's the incorrect way of thinking about this, at least according to how US insider trading laws work. If a hedge fund has reason to believe oil prices will spike due to some secret info (eg. they paid some intern to camp out at US airbases and spot outgoing flights), and then they made massive bank on that trade, that's not insider trading. It's not a crime to hoard material nonpublic information and trade on it (ie. "updating a financial instrument ... and getting massive bank for not providing the information that would make everyone else bet the same way"). Now, if they paid off some guy inside the base, that might be breaking a bunch of laws around national security, but still not insider trading.
First, yes, you’re right.
Second, they raised a shit ton of money under the bull case of mass consumer adoption, which is going to be impossible if that said consumer feels it is rigged.
Let’s all be real here; for 95% of their use cases both now and in the future, they’re a sportsbook. Which is fine! But they’re not going to get to anywhere near returning a multiple on their manic valuation until they act like one. And the first thing to do is to stop with all of the pseudo-academic bullshit about what a prediction market is. And the second is for them to hire someone, anyone, who knows even the first thing about sports because everyone even tangentially connected to this market knows that before six months ago, Tarek and Shayne couldn’t differentiate between a football and a buttplug.
It is not about "accurate prediction". That is just dumb rationalization.
People taking sides against each other means the losers and winners are individuals.
Meanwhile sports betting is growing but the winners are “the house”, the companies.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/27/middleeast/us-embassy-israel-...
Friday ^^
Surely that’s easy for Iran to hear about.
It seems weird to know the attack was coming and yet their leader still gets killed.
More generally, if it was so obvious how come the odds were so long?
If it were so obvious that winning required no insider knowledge the odds should be better.
My social circle had largely expected that Iran was getting bombed on Saturday or Sunday once the evacuation notices went out Friday, and this intuition was merely from laymen who follow the news. I don't doubt that insider trading was involved as it's the norm with this Admin, but I also don't doubt that many savvy people could've legally placed successful bets.
"Last summer one “ricosuave666” won more than $150,000 on Polymarket, a betting platform. Their true identity was not clear, but the source of the winnings was: ricosuave666 had bet, with suspicious accuracy, on the precise timing of Israel’s attacks on Iran."
So, these people can be found. Overall however, the magazine does not think that these markets should have a blanket ban.
[1] https://archive.is/W8Ga8 (Prediction markets are rife with insider betting)
Before the Iran bets there was a suspected Google insider who made $1.15M on Polymarket (22 of 23 correct bets in 24 hours) and Israeli soldiers criminally charged for monetizing classified intelligence on event contracts.
Textbook Akerlof: without enforcement the adverse selection spiral kills these markets before they get a chance to prove useful. I tracked all three cases here: https://philippdubach.com/posts/the-absolute-insider-mess-of...
A new Polymarket account made over $500k betting on the U.S. strike against Iran
For a good while there, the headlines went from “oniony” to “sim-city news headline flavor text” to “I can’t believe I share a finite existence with the people being discussed”
Or both.
I am commenting in this thread to pass time, but I assume there is a such a high chance the linked article is not true, or at least has a hidden agenda, such that it should be ignored or treated as entertainment. Could be product placement, could be completely manufactured rage-bait, who knows, and more importantly, I have no reason to care.