[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.