In stock markets, insider trading is a big no not because it ruins someone's gambling habit, but because the entire concept of the corporation requires a certain amount of trust of financiers in financees. That whole pooling of capital thing, to do stuff that has too high a capital requirement to start individually. When shares are publicly traded, that trust is impossible when holders have to assume that they will be gamed by employee-owners and that would mean nobody outside the circle of those in the know would ever put in money and then you could just give up and declare that publicly traded corporations simply can't exist. "Don't bother investing, they will strip you".<p>Prediction markets don't have any "natural" reason like that for excluding insider trading. It's just "game designers" crying their hearts out when someone ruins their game by having an advantage.<p>The employee could not be an insider if his employer did not exists because of a lack of rules against him trading. The prediction market not existing would not make the insider any less of an insider (we are not tking about people inside the prediction market maker!)
> <i>Prediction markets don't have any "natural" reason like that for excluding insider trading</i><p>Corporate employees abusing trust are doing it equivalently whether they trade securities or place bets. Government employees, similarly, don’t personally own the country’s data.<p>In a minority of cases, the information is one’s own, <i>e.g.</i> bets on how many times a person says a word. But most of the time, there is a breach of trust.
It's not just data, right? Power can be abused as well. That person has power to control the narrative and can make a large bet on the number of times he can say the word.<p>So now it's public servants military power, congressional power, and they look to enrich themselves with making (or lobbying for) decisions which affect the outcome of a bet.<p>You could imagine an army general that lobbies for the bombing of Iran knowing the president has his ear, and then bets on the bombing of Iran by March 2026.
This issue reveals the gap between the prediction market premise and what these things actually are, which is: unregulated prop gambling venues.<p>If things like Kalshi and Polymarket are prediction markets, then, at least as far as the intrinsic concerns of the market itself are concerned, insider trading is a good thing; literally part of the point.<p>If they are instead how they function today, then insider trading is a game-breaking fairness issue, like having a device to read your opponents cards in a poker game, and then they're a real problem.<p>You can tell what these businesses think their platforms are for by how they handle these issues.
Even <i>if</i> you buy the idea that Kalshi is a prediction market whose mechanism is gambling but whose product is accurate predictions, you don't have to buy the idea that insider trading is a good thing. Yes, in the rare occasion there exists someone with (a) insider information (b) confidence their actions won't impact their insider position and (c) access to capital - then you get extremely accurate predictions.<p>In <i>every</i> other case you get worse predictions. Since those who are <i>predicting</i> have to now construct their bets such that they know they can always get run over by an insider. So in the general case it reduces the ability of the predictors to push the market in the right direction, because they always have to risk manage the fact that someone out there might run them over with insider information.
Not just insider information, but insider <i>access</i>. If the outcome of some prop bet is under the control of a handful of people, those people can trivially conspire to produce whatever outcome is most profitable to them.
If the outcome of a prop bet really is fully controlled by insiders, so that those insiders are making decisions based on betting outcomes, then allowing that betting to occur seems antisocial and counterproductive to begin with. This is another problem with the Polymarket/Kalshi species of "prediction market".
If people with more information profit at the expense of people with less information, isn't that exactly how things are supposed to work?<p>If you're approaching a market with hard facts, detailed comparisons and solid evidence; while I'm trading in the same market based on vibes and intuition, surely it's expected that your returns would be better, and mine worse?
Short answer, no. If you're betting on an outcome that can be controlled by an individual or small group, the incentive is for them to game the system by doing the OPPOSITE of what the prediction is so as to make the most money.<p>"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law</a>
If you’re betting with a friend that they won’t have chicken for dinner, what’s to stop them from having chicken for dinner? What if you bet with a complete stranger who also took the reverse of that bet from your friend?
A fact is a statement about past. A bet is contingent on the future.<p>Insiders can change the facts.
You're confusing collusion with being informed. The concept of market rationality is based on the premise that all participants in said market more or less have access to the same information. Fools can choose to not be informed before making a trade, but passing along sensitive information that contradicts market rational behavior causes people to lose trust in the market.<p>Perfect example from today. Allbirds just announced that they're going all in on AI infra, skyrocketing the stock. Had I bought a million dollars worth of Allbirds yesterday, everyone would think I'm an idiot. But now, they would think I have insider information and would no longer want to participate because it would make no sense to buy Allbirds yesterday unless I knew the announcement was coming.
If an insider with large amounts of capital makes a big trade, they also end up discouraging other trades. Once you see a huge position taken, LPs are going to scale back their liquidity in other positions to manage risk that the insider is going to stomp them. Any trader monitoring position sizes is going to probably scale back their trading. All of this contributes to less trading and less commission on these markets.<p>Sports betting is so profitable for prediction markets because they're mostly unsophisticated retail flow making lots and lots of trades, giving the platforms commission. If an insider just pushes market prices in their direction the platforms are going to lose on volume.
> Since those who are predicting have to now construct their bets such that they know they can always get run over by an insider.<p>The average person does not do this. People trade individual stocks all the time, despite every other market participant (banks, hedge funds, etc.) having better information and technology.<p>It's why institutions like Citadel pay for retail order flow. They know that retail traders don't have an edge and, if anything, often end up being negative signal.
You can see all across the responses here the encoded premise that the point of a prediction market is to enable people to profit from making accurate predictions. No. The point is for the price to be accurate; for the <i>market</i> to make an accurate prediction. That someone with a P1 prediction can roll over people with less confidence is a feature.
Courts have ruled that these markets are regulated under the CFTC. So they are regulated. Now as to whether it is properly regulated, thats a different matter.
Where do you see a difference? Like you said, there is a libertarian argument that can be made for why insider trading is desirable. If the bet is easily manipulable, like how many times someone will visit a place, then the rational response is for others not to bet on that market. The same argument still holds.<p>You can disagree with the libertarian argument, but I don't see how you can say that Polymarket et al. are something other than a prediction market. Can you explain where you see the difference?
I'm not a libertarian. My basic policy take on these "markets" is that they should be outlawed.
It’s not a libertarian argument for prediction markets that they should have insider trading, it’s the point of the exercise. The way they work is to incentivize people with knowledge to externalize the knowledge to the market. The concept of fairness doesn’t even make sense in that context.<p>So if a market is trying to maintain a veneer of fairness it’s just using a prediction market as cover and is something else.
So the difference between a theoretically pure prediction market and Kalshi is ... this interview? The CEO saying that he thinks others, who do not answer to him in any way, will be doing something to enforce some notion of fairness.<p>If you're being that puritan about the definition, then having a "real" prediction market is completely impossible. Because actors like the DOJ do not wait for a statement by the Kalshi CEO to bring charges. And rational actors will know and anticipate that, and hence preemptively comply. So you never get the unfettered version of a prediction market.<p>I don't think it makes sense to be that puritan about a definition that the thing it's trying to define becomes an impossibility. Polymarket, Kalshi et al are clearly prediction markets in the messy reality that we live in, and we're figuring out as we go what the legal reality of a real-world prediction market is and should be.
Your surmise cuts both ways though; much of the stockmarket is fundamentally doing the same thing. It's just the prop bet is a normalized white collar activity.<p>I'd like regulations to cut into that too, so the market isn't just a weird "Did trump tweet something deranged today?"
I don't understand why it is a crime under current US law.<p>Prediction markets can only do sports gambling (the vast majority of their volume) because they self-certify under the CFTC. The CFTC doesn't have the same standards of "insider trading" as the stock market, because insider trading is the entire point of business at the CFTC!<p>If you're trading, like, oil futures or wheat futures or whatever, you are likely doing so specifically because you have inside information about your business needs or production that you want to hedge.<p>I understand why people are <i>mad</i> about gambling versus someone who has insider information, but under current US law I'm not sure that there is a case to be made.
> <i>If you're trading, like, oil futures or wheat futures or whatever, you are likely doing so specifically because you have inside information about your business needs</i><p>Insider trading, in the U.S., is not legally about fairness but about theft. A firm hedging its own positions is using its information for its own purposes. A federal employee trading on what they heard is abusing the trust placed in them by the American people.
> Prediction markets can only do sports gambling (the vast majority of their volume) because they self-certify under the CFTC<p>Sports betting is still illegal in 11 states. They can only do what they’re doing because of legislation and enforcement lag.<p>> The CFTC doesn't have the same standards of "insider trading" as the stock market, because insider trading is the entire point of business at the CFTC!<p>True to some extent, but it’s still illegal to use non-public information gained from your firm to trade on personal accounts.
I understand he wants to deflect liability from his platform, but I guess I have to concede that it seems like a legitimate defense. We allow the stock market to exist even though insider trading can happen and it's (I think?) not Nasdaq's or NYSE's responsibility to pursue that. We have a legal system for that.<p>I think there is still the debate to be had whether prediction market enable too much criminal activity and insider trading compared to traditional stock markets and therefore need to be limited for pragmatic reasons (i.e. the legal system can't keep up), but that's a different discussion.
> “If you commit insider trading on Kalshi, that can and will at some point be a federal crime. It is a federal crime,”<p>Am I misunderstanding? It seems like two different statements he always conflates.<p>If it becomes a federal crime at some point, it will become illegal from that point — you can't prosecute people for acts committed before they were crimes.<p>The only way that this could be a federal crime right now is if the government starts prosecuting it under existing laws without any changes. I don't see that as likely.
It’s a federal crime once someone gets convicted for it. Without any precedent it will be up to the first case to lay out how existing law applies to new phenomena that may or may not be covered, depending on what a judge thinks of the arguments.
It is a federal crime, but one could be forgiven for assuming federal crimes committed by this administration will not be prosecuted while this administration is in power.
I don't think he's saying people who do that right now will be prosecuted. I think he's just saying that it will become illegal so anyone doing it then runs the risk of being prosecuted.<p>> The only way that this could be a federal crime right now is if the government starts prosecuting it under existing laws without any changes. I don't see that as likely.<p>Fully agree, especially since Kalshi just caught one of the editors of MrBeast's videos red handed (he was betting on the "What words will MrBeast say in his next video" market with 100% accuracy) and while Kalshi banned the guy the DOJ has shown 0 interest in doing anything with that.
Schrodinger's felony
IANAL, but my understanding is that they can make it a retroactive crime or clarify existing laws in ways that include prediction markets.<p>Don't assume safety.<p>Edit - was curious:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law</a><p>So maybe not?<p>I'd love a judicial scholar's input.
IANAL but a proud American haha, and we're very specific on not allowing ex post facto laws per our constitution. It would be a huge avenue for abuse of power by the government against the people.<p>The caveat I added to my initial comment that you also mentioned was that they could try to find a relevant existing law and retrofit it, e.g. general securities laws, and say that this is a securities market and so this has always been illegal — but it's very unlikely and I doubt it would work. Far, far more likely that we pass explicit laws about this.
The executive branch executes laws (prosecutes crime) under its own interpretation of the law. It's the supreme court that determines if that interpretation is acceptable or fair. I.e. you could be prosecuted under an executive's interpretation of an existing law when the crime was committed and if the court deems it acceptable you could be found guilty by a jury. (In the USA)
They absolutely cannot make it a retroactive crime. This isn't so much con law as high school civics in the US.
“Retroactive” crime is as you say, ex post facto, and specifically disallowed by the US Constitution.
No, you cannot retroactively make something a crime as you have found.<p>That way lies madness.<p>If the govt could do that, they could arrest anyone, anytime simply by making whatever they did yesterday retroactively illegal.
This DoJ is actively working to protect actual sex traffickers from accountability. What makes this doofus think they will ever investigate their own friends for insider trading?
Isn't the entire point of prediction markets to surface insider trading as a feature and not a bug?<p>Short, casual reads<p>- <a href="https://jamaalglenn.substack.com/p/prediction-markets-were-designed" rel="nofollow">https://jamaalglenn.substack.com/p/prediction-markets-were-d...</a><p>- <a href="https://money.com/prediction-markets-insider-trading/" rel="nofollow">https://money.com/prediction-markets-insider-trading/</a><p>More academic?<p>- <a href="https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/insiderbet.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/insiderbet.pdf</a><p>AND<p>- <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yZKGbq1YmA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yZKGbq1YmA</a><p>Discussion on possible solutions that references the academic view<p>- <a href="https://www.dopaminemarkets.com/p/how-to-solve-insider-trading-in-prediction" rel="nofollow">https://www.dopaminemarkets.com/p/how-to-solve-insider-tradi...</a>
Can I bet on this?
Well... it is a felony.
“If you commit insider trading on Kalshi, that can and will at some point be a federal crime. It is a federal crime, I actually do expect the DOJ to prosecute some of these cases”. I'm guessing that “some point” is sometime after Jan 20th 2029.
The Kalshi CEO should put their considerable wealth into bets on Kalshi that this will happen. I'll wait.<p>We have a situation where selective prosecution is used to command loyalty while the ringleader has been immunized from any kind of legal consequences by the Supreme Court, 6 of whom were appointed by said ringleader. Pardons are pretty openly sold now. It's cheaper to rip off the government then pay a fraction for a pardon, erasing any fine or repayment.<p>I bet there are lower level staffers who are profiting off inside information on prediction markets. Maybe some will be made an example of. I won't hold my breath.<p>But all the big insider trading is occurring in securities markets, particularly with oil futures and SPY futures. It's reached the point where no professionals trust the futre oil prices at all and and the physical oil prices differ from the future price by as much as $60/barrel. We've had $1b+ bets on SPY futures minutes before market-changing news. We don't know for sure who's doing this but my guess is that it's at the highest levels of the administration.
Ok, but isn't the idea that prediction markets surface private knowledge a big part of the defense as to why they shouldn't be treated as illegal gambling?<p>So like, which is it, is insider trading expected, or are these just gambling sites that should be illegal in many jurisdictions?
Yes. This argument doesn't even apprehend insider trading laws <i>on regulated securities markets</i> in the US, where the crime is about theft, not fairness.
Correct. This is an important distinction.<p>Matt Levine has a good take on this. His informal, distilled definition is essentially:<p>- There is a time gap where insiders know something material and the public does not.<p>- Someone with access to that material nonpublic information, who is not supposed to use it for personal gain, trades on it anyway.<p>- That conduct is treated by courts as a deceptive scheme against the less‑informed trading counterparty and against the information’s rightful “owner.”<p>In other words - you profit at another person's expense (e.g. stealing) because you have information and the other person doesn't.<p>Two scenarios:<p>(1) a US Naval Officer knows about a strike 24 hours before it happens and places a bet against someone who doesn't have knowledge about the strike.<p>(2) Neither a US Naval Officer knows about a strike 24 hours before it happens and someone who doesn't have knowledge about the strike do nothing.<p>Scenario 1 is (or should be) illegal because the officer is using the information for personal gain, when the information was explicitly given to them for national defense reasons (thus violating the rightful owner clause).
If all one cares about is the accuracy of predictions (i.e. setting aside value judgements vis-a-vis society or fairness), it does seem like "insider trading" should make prediction markets more accurate.
It makes them more accurate <i>at the time the insider places the bet</i>. But to maximise profit, they are incentivised to misdirect <i>before</i> they place the bet (and worse still from society's perspective, are incentivised to take counter-intuitive or downright harmful actions to profit at the expense of people who bet on the view that it made no sense for them to do that)
Agreed. So who are the outsider chumps taking the other ends of these bets? At this point, it doesn’t make sense to participate unless you’re an insider.
Prediction Markets, unlike many gambling sites, create a marketplace for odds. There's no house taking positions like in certain casinos or on DraftKings. Market makers offer shares in Yes and No while bettors buy and sell these odds to each other or to market makers.
> isn't the idea that prediction markets surface private knowledge a big part of the defense as to why they shouldn't be treated as illegal gambling<p>No. Their defense is that they are a gamified platform for futures contracts and hence should fall under CFTC regulation.<p>The CFTC <i>also</i> cracks down on insider trading, but it took time for them to write regulations to catch up with prediction markets.<p>It is now a priority [0] and they have just started a paid whistleblower [1] programs specifically to catch insider traders within prediction markets.<p>[0] - <a href="https://www.lw.com/en/insights/new-cftc-enforcement-director-speaks-on-priorities-insider-trading-in-prediction-markets-and-coop" rel="nofollow">https://www.lw.com/en/insights/new-cftc-enforcement-director...</a><p>[1] - <a href="https://www.whistleblower.gov/whistleblower-alerts/Insider_Trading_WBO_Alert.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.whistleblower.gov/whistleblower-alerts/Insider_T...</a>
On the Polymarket homepage right now, one of the featured markets is whether or not Bitcoin will be up or down over the next 5 minutes. It's hard to justify that as anything more than illegal gambling.<p>I find prediction markets to be interesting on two fronts:<p>1) They like a really good way to determine the probability of something happening, which is interesting for events like elections<p>2) It provides an avenue for smart bettors to take advantage and sharpen their skill, whereas they get severely limited or banned from traditional sports books<p>However, it seems like all incentive structures for the markets and consumer behavior will steer these things to degenerate gambling.
Polymarket is not CFTC regulated, it's considered illegal in the US. CFTC does not allow betting on securities prices. Cryptocurrency is a bit of a gray area because it's not considered a registered security.<p>N.B. it becomes a bit frustrating to talk about financial and regulatory things on this site because the level of knowledge is generally "I read some articles on social media about markets" level.
> Cryptocurrency is a bit of a gray area because it's not considered a registered security<p>Additionally, the SEC and CFTC guidance on what digital asset can be treated as a security and what can be treated as a commodity was only released a couple weeks ago [0].<p>Stuff is changing rapidly so it's best to keep an experienced regulatory lawyer on retainer.<p>> N.B. it becomes a bit frustrating to talk about financial and regulatory things on this site because the level of knowledge is generally "I read some articles on social media about markets" level.<p>Yep. It is what it is.<p>[0] - <a href="https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2026/03/crypto-clarity-sec-and-cftc-issue-comprehensive-crypto-asset-guidance-part-1" rel="nofollow">https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2026/03/crypto-clarity-sec-...</a>
> Their defense is that they are a gamified futures contracts and hence should fall under CFTC regulation.<p>That might be the defense. They are inherently designed to leverage insider trading though. I made a top level comment with links/resources that argues why.
Prediction markets don’t need to surface private knowledge, they can surface sophisticated interpretations of public knowledge. They are certainly gambling if you’re an unsophisticated rube (which is most of the users).
I'm guessing it's Trump insiders who are busy making bank on inside info. Some of them just happen to be big investors in Polymarket and Kalshi. There's no way they are getting investigated, let alone prosecuted, by this DOJ.<p>At most some low-level flunkie will get named and slapped on the wrist.
Translation: "it's not our problem"
Zero chance. This country has become an absolute joke of corruption, especially anything related to insider trading.
I agree the country has rampant corruption, but I disagree that the US DOJ should be pursuing insider trading on these markets.<p>Why should my tax dollars be spent on helping a bookie run their gambling business? Insider trading laws and prosecution in the financial markets makes sense, because the fair and impartial enforcement helps all of our economy, and allows capital to do its job investing in productive ventures.<p>These prediction markets are not that. They aren’t sources of investment for a productive enterprise, it is pure gambling.<p>Why should the US government spend money making sure people can gamble? If people want their gambling to be fair, they can pay for their own enforcement.<p>I like the idea of insider trading running rampant on these platforms. Once people realize that the other side of their bet knows the outcomes in advance, maybe they will stop betting their money on these platforms and they can just die.
> Why should my tax dollars be spent on helping a bookie run their gambling business?<p>I mean, current laws do exactly this. The FBI has done investigations for major sports betting sites related to players throwing or fixing games, etc. If you commit fraud on a sportsbook you absolutely can go to jail.