[beaviskhan]

You'd have to be spectacularly stupid to bet on these kinds of things without having insider knowledge, because you ought to know good and damn well by now that the people with insider knowledge are DEFINITELY betting on them.

[3eb7988a1663]

Even if you are not "betting" similar trades are happening in the stock market as well. Large movements in oil futures shortly before policy changes are announced.

[janalsncm]

Insider trading is at least regulated in the stock market, albeit imperfectly. Imagine how much worse it would be if C-levels could just short their own stock during a board meeting. No one without insider knowledge would touch it.

[troyastorino]

Matt Levine often says something like "insider trading is not about fairness, it's about theft." The problem isn't that it's less fair to some stock traders than others, and that stock trading should be some form of perfect gambling where everyone has an equal chance of success. Stock trading is inherently about exploiting information asymmetries — that is what all "non-insiders" are trying to do. But insider trading is wrong because it's effectively stealing confidential information from the company & shareholders, which is in violation of & conflict with the fiduciary responsibility that board members, executives, and employees generally have towards shareholders.

Conceptually, I think that is the right analogy to think about. Prediction markets "want" to be a more accurate source of information, just like stock markets, so from that lens "getting" information to be more accurate is good. When government officials are placing bets on prediction markets, though, it's a massive violation of operational security, and leaking confidential information. They probably think that they are acting anonymously, but it creates so many opportunities for unfriendly state actors to get information, especially if people do it consistently.

[wallst07]

Yes, 100%, it is information asymmetry. It happens in every "market" in the world.

The goal should be to balance the information asymmetry, not burry it.

Government officials using their power to affect war decisions ought to be a crime on it's own, not surfacing the information to the public through a prediction market.

[janalsncm]

This was my thought. If these markets continue allowing insiders, it’ll drive all of the cash from regular people away. So there will be way less money for insiders to win even if they are allowed.

So the perception of insiders is pretty bad for prediction markets as a business imo.

The sooner they knock off the rhetoric about the “theory” behind prediction markets and start thinking about it like a business, the sooner they will take insiders seriously.

[a2128]

I think the market could adapt if regular people left. Insider trading would become multilayered and complex. Insiders would scheme against lower-level insiders; decisionmakers would try to trick insiders into thinking that one thing will happen before doing the complete opposite thing. The world would become more erratic and unpredictable, even insiders wouldn't know what is going on.

Although Polymarket is currently spending a lot of money trying to market itself to working-class regular people to get hooked and scam their paychecks out of[0]

[0] https://nypost.com/2026/02/12/us-news/nyc-gets-its-first-fre...

[janalsncm]

The problem is that the number of people who have any sort of “insider” (material non public) info at all is orders of magnitude lower than the number of people who are well-versed in material public info. And not all insiders are going to place bets.

Kalshi and poly market are going after mass market appeal which is why they buy Super Bowl ads.

[crazygringo]

I mean, the thing is, insiders will disagree. Nobody has a crystal ball to predict the future perfectly.

Military operations go awry. Countries react in unexpected ways. Leaders change their minds.

And as a potential event gets closer, insider information changes. Different insiders have different sets of partial knowledge.

You don't even need scheming and tricking. Just regular reality is already complicated enough.

[zarzavat]

That's not how insider trading works though.

Let's say that you know that event Y is going to be announced that will make event X more likely. Before Y is announced you buy shares in X on a prediction market or buy some asset that has price correlated with X. After the announcement you liquidate your position and pocket the difference.

Whether X actually happens or not is irrelevant to you. All that's relevant is the timing of the announcement of Y and the directional effect of Y on X.

[lostlogin]

> If these markets continue allowing insiders

What are the chances of large bets being made by anyone who isn’t an insider?

[stouset]

> it’ll drive all of the cash from regular people away

Sweet summer child…

It is widely accepted that this is happening. Dumb money continues to be poured into these markets.

[stubish]

A bet against an event is win/win if you want that event to occur. If you are a country that wanted the US to strike Iran, placing a large number of bets that they won't either gets you what you want or earns you money. It is one reason why you can't bet on someone being murdered, as it creates a deniable market to crowd source assassination. Strange that you can crowd source war, but not assassination.

[strulovich]

You also have to be quite stupid to do it with insider knowledge. A bunch of them have been caught in Israel.

Being indicted for treason and treason like charges sounds worse than the SEC coming after you.

[bluecalm]

Same goes for sport betting and yet here we are. People like to bet. They willingly bet on things they have guaranteed disadvantage on (casino games like roulette, slots etc.). People also drink pure poison (alcohol), smoke pure poison (cigarettes) and engage in brain dead activities like speeding and street racing.

Gambling should be judged as any other vice - people get something out of it (rush, hope, whatever) not by rational money allocation standards.

[agumonkey]

considering the scale involved, and the OSINT trend, is it possible that people could monitor and correlate stuff like airplane, or us navy activity to deduce when to enter ?

[nathancahill]

I saw a tweet about a trader placing an oil bet when they saw two military aircraft turn around on their way to Iran, via transponder. I believe before the deal was announced.

[3eb7988a1663]

That also sounds easy enough to fake for some plausible deniability.

[yellow_postit]

Just as parallel construction [1] is used by law enforcement to conceal methods and practices no reason to not expect the same for financial gain.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

[wallst07]

Traders have been using satellite images from around the world for DECADES, it seems more likely to be true than a conspiracy from a insider who actually makes the decision or has first line access to it.

[3eb7988a1663]

If I have access to expensive real-time satellite imagery, I am not blasting my insights on Twitter.

[huorricannes]

in fact US army publicly admitting running a disinformation campaign involving flying planes knowing they would be seen by osint in the previous Iran attack from last summer

[stefan_]

Do you buy oil or products made with it? Then sorry, you made a bet, and in fact you were just ripped off by your own government for the third time in a row.

This is not a "crypto prediction market" problem.

[crazygringo]

And this is the whole point.

Prediction markets are supposed to be providing the most accurate predictions.

The most accurate predictions come from insider information.

Poeple complaining about insider trading on prediction markets seem to be missing the point. They're supposed to have insider trading. That's the whole idea.

[ndsipa_pomu]

If the prediction markets are supposed to have insider trading, then they should be made illegal.

[crazygringo]

Insider trading isn't inherently bad. Any wager between two people is always going to contain some informational asymmetry.

There are good reasons why insider trading illegal for publicly traded stocks.

But those reasons don't translate to prediction markets.

[ndsipa_pomu]

Why don't those reasons translate to prediction markets?

As I see it, insider trading leads to insiders making decisions purely to game the (prediction) markets which means that markets become more erratic and will surely lead to less money being available for companies to grow as investors realise that they are being robbed.

[paulpauper]

couldn't you somehow in theory track the order book to if and when insiders are betting and then copy the trade?

[georgemcbay]

For prediction markets you can find out who the insiders are for different categories over time, see for example:

https://x.com/peterjliu/status/2024901585806225723

But there is still the problem of knowing which new trades the insiders made before the bet is settled (maybe solved by being an insider of the prediction market), and also since prediction markets need money on both sides (you are betting against other people, not the 'house') when the insiders make their buy they probably eat up most of or all of the action on the other side.

[andrepd]

Not knowing who are the insiders and who is the dumb flow is like the fundamental problem of hft

[iknowSFR]

You can trade on non-public information if you obtain that information unintentionally. Now you have to be able to prove it’s unintentional if the question came up. A real experience example of this is if you work in an office building and your neighboring company, a public company, is being raided by the FBI. Can you use that information to take a position in the market? Yes, according to multiple attorneys we spoke with.

I bring this up because we assume the trading is coming from insiders but I wonder if the parties behind this have baked in a layer similar to my story above.

To close this back to your comment, and I don’t have an answer here: is knowing who the insiders are and acting on that a crime? If you did know and didn’t report them, are you breaking a law? Or worse, you reported it to the deaf ears of a regulator that are focused elsewhere or are under resourced to respond now?

[huorricannes]

intentionally/unintentionally is not relevant.

it's legal to follow FBI cars and see who they raid so as to make trades. you could even have a hedge fund specialized on this. it's called alternative data

you can even be a regular employer of a public company and trade based on information sent on internal emails.

the only thing illegal is to be a designated insider - typically a restricted group of people with access to sensitive information

[JumpCrisscross]

> you can even be a regular employer of a public company and trade based on information sent on internal emails

You absolutely cannot.

[Supermancho]

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

[3eb7988a1663]

How is there enough volume to cover the other side of the bet with these minutes-before trades?

[andrepd]

The oil market is, to put it mildly, fucking huge

[JumpCrisscross]

> oil market is, to put it mildly, fucking huge

Sure. But these aren't trades in "the oil market." They're bets on Polymarket and a specific oil-futures exchange.

[OutOfHere]

Are you implying that there is arbitrage between the prediction market and the real market? Until now we were assuming that the prediction market is self-contained, with its other side staying within the confines of the prediction market.

[huorricannes]

the other side can and many times is an arbitrageour which has positions in both the prediction market and the real market

[3eb7988a1663]

For sure, the real trading markets are huge. I mean the betting platforms.

[huorricannes]

the betting markets offset positions with the real markets. it's all connected

[paulpauper]

insiders would presumably be bigger trades that show high conviction about improbable events. An insider would wait until the last minute to take advantage of low prices of a market close to expiration.

[cout]

In theory that is part of what was supposed to have been solved by CAT.

[phrygian]

What is CAT?

[socalgal2]

Apparently, according to you, lots of people are spectularly stupid because the only way you make money in a prediction market is for someone to bet on the opposing view point.

[jagged-chisel]

And how else would one make money in a prediction market? The winner isn't paid from the ether; money doesn't just materialize to pay the winner.