Newly created Polymarket accounts win big on well-timed Iran ceasefire bets

It incentives them to keep the info secret in order to profit or a wager on a related outcome. The insider info remains secret, all people know is some bloke stood up a new account and placed a big bet.

And for these short timespan bets, it seems utterly useless. If the wagers were only allowed on things two weeks out, and not allow bets on short term events then maybe it could show more info.

Now look at Polymarket's advertising. It is 100% presented as a gambling platform, not an information discovery system. There is nothing saying "don't play if you don't have insider information." I do not think that we can reasonably fall back on this defense of these platforms anymore.

I also don't much societal value in these platform's ability to suggest political events a few hours before they happen.

And this wasn't even really the original theoretical claim for these markets. The goal was to financially incentivize research and deep investigation, not to financially incentivize people who have access to hidden information by default. If somebody developed a system for predicting cease fires and used that to win in these markets then we've created a new thing for society. If somebody is just in the room when a cease fire is decided we haven't progressed society at all. All we've done is create a new way for people with power to extract personal wealth.

I'm so tired of people parroting this line as if it somehow explains everything. These new Prediction Markets are nothing but a new way of gambling. period.

I’m concerned about people with addictions being exploited by greedy degenerates who don’t care about the negative externalities with which they’re burdening our society, yes.

If a gov't official (including the president) is leaking classified information, there's already laws about that isnt there? (Whether it's effective is another question - i'm assuming it's currently effective).

What if 100% of the bets you place in a slot machine go to the owner? It's the exact same thing here.

Slot machines are regulated so the game is fair and they're not simply machines where the rich steal from the poor. Such a machine would be scam by definition.

At least it would somewhat hinder the type of activity we’ve seen (where journalists are threatened by criminals to withdraw or change their stories) without just banning such betting exchanges outright.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/18/polymarket-gam...

Its potentially much worse: we don't know if the threats and bets are isolated. While diplomacy happens, the threats may very well be exaggerated to create the market opportunity.

My point is that the entire premise of "why it's ackchyually good though" is wrong. The thesis is that the markets let intelligent agents flourish, adding value to the real world. When really, the insiders can be idiots and still win.

We gain no new information because the insider has every incentive to hold off on their move until the very last minute, maximally reducing the effects of theta and vega, to maximize profit. This adds little to no practical information to the market while potentially removing super-predictors from the market.

It just becomes a vehicle for insider-trading, so make that illegal, cancellable, or just get rid of the market altogether.

This made me curious: who regulates sports betting? And the answer seems to be... nobody. Well, the states. I guess I should've known that because I know some states ban sports betting.

But that's interesting compared to prediction marekts. Since they're federally regulated, states don't have as much control. And I see that the current CFTC commissioner is suing states to block prediction markets. And prediction markets can and do allow sports betting.

Another "win" for dual sovereignty.

Here's one way it matters though. Futures markets are typically in a state of backwardation or contango. Backwardation simply means the spot (or physical) price is higher than the paper or future price. Contango is the opposite. Whichever one it is, says something about the current market and the expectations for the future.

So the silver market was in backwardation where the paper price was $75+/oz but the physical price might've been $100+ but nobody was buying. People with silver delivery obligations were simply borrowing silver from those who had it rather than buying it on the spot market. There's a whole separate market for borrowing commodities and the premiums soared. But people who had shorted silver simply couldn't afford to buy on the spot market without going broke so they didn't. They kicked the can down the street, borrowed and then lobbied for the exchange to pop the bubble (which they did).

The best example of a contango market was in March-April 2020 with the oil market. This was the beginning of the pandemic and oil demand fell off a cliff. So people who already had oil couldn't move the oil they had and thus had no room to take delivery of oil they'd already bought (via futures). Producers only have so much storage room before they have to shut off production. Side note: Gulf producers have had to do this in the last month.

But the net effect was there was all this oil and nowhere for it to go so for a brief period the price went negative. That's right. Producers were paying you to take oil. That was an extreme contango market.

So in the last month I've heard data points like Dubai crude was $120-130 paper and $178 physical. That's a huge margin. I don't know what the normal range is really. In a healthy market you'd expect physical prices to be pretty near to short-term future prices.

In any bullish market, you'll get hoarders. There are limits to what you can store though and those are very real because if you shut off production, you might still be accuring a lot of costs and it can take days to restart production. As such I think you'll find producers generally just want to sell.

But a lot of hedging goes on too. This can make price spikes worse, actually. Now it's pretty common for US oil producers to not drill a well until they've already sold part or most of the oil it's expected to produce on the futures market, for risk purposes. But in times like now, nobody's going to drill a well to sell at a future price of $70 (which the 1 year price might still be) and because there's a lead time on oil production, this can create future shortages.

There are a lot of components that go into gas prices and it's driven by sevearl supply-demand curves such as the price of crude, the demand for refined petroleum products (also called the "crack spread") and just the demand for gas in general.

But it gets more complicated because even though oil is a global commodity it's not entirely global. There are regional differences where some oil and gas can only go to some areas due to limited pipelines and limited pipeline capacity. So you can still end up with wildly varying regional crude prices.

Plus you have California that really has no pieplines so is largely disconnected from the national oil supply. As such ~75% of California's oil comes from foreign imports. And guess what? ~20% of those come from Iraq and, as such, California is impacted by the closing of the Strait of Hormuz when really no other lower 48 state is.

So we, as a country, both import oil and export oil, which makes a lot of conversations about "energy independence" just wrong.

Anyway, back to gas. Crude is only one component. There are a bunch of additives to create different gas blends used in the US. These are typically divided into winter and summer blends. The additives basically change how much gas (as in, the state of matter, not short for gasoline here) is in your gas tank. Why? Because more gas (state of matter) equals more smog so more additives are added to increase the boiling point in summer.

And on top of that some states, most notably California, have their own blends, which come from Californian refneries, which get their oil from the Gulf (in part).

There are a lot of seemingly unintended consequences in all of this too. So, for example, we're selling a bunch more LNG to Europe because of Ukraine but that's really raising domestic natural gas prices and that's having a huge impact on utility prices. And only going to get worse.

Oh and let's not forget that included in the price of gas are also taxes. Those typically don't scale with price (in the US at least).

Most openly corrupt president of our time.

In my personal experience that "scenario" is a wearisome but stable job with a good income that would afford a comfortable middle class lifestyle. Yet this unfortunate circumstance was so intolerable that they would rather risk, and have in fact realised, the complete financial ruin of themselves and the ruin of the prospects and happiness of their children than continue to suffer it. So I had little else other than contempt, for them and others like them, when they came to me asking for money.