I don't understand, what's so fundamentally wrong with this form of insider trading? Is the accusation that it makes degenerate gambling unfair? Is it necessary for degenerate gambling to be fair? The gamblers don't seem to care.
beyond the general idea that we shouldn't normalize gambling, betting on some real-life events is horrid. think about insider trading on a polymarket bet for someone's death.
Or even worse what happens when people start gambling that someone won’t die today? It opens the door to crowdsourced hits with plausible deniability.
You missed out the <i>reason</i> that it's horrid, which is that it is a plausibly-deniable way to crowdfund assassinations.
Matt Levine pointed out in a past article that the real danger of insider trading are company insiders being incentivised to damage the company to make a quick buck.
> insiders being incentivised to damage the company<p>I'd like to emphasize that this incentive doesn't have to be an accidental find by the insider either: The "market" can end up facilitating anonymous crowd-sourced bribery by enemies or competitors, who create the potential for profit knowing that eventually an insider will take the other end of the implied deal.<p>Every time I see someone dismissing these kinds of issues--especially someone whose salary depends on not-understanding it [0] --I imagine how their tune would change if the shoe was on the other foot. For example, if someone created a "prediction market" where people could anonymously bet on <i>unusual deaths or serious injuries</i> of... prediction-market executives.<p>[0] <a href="https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/" rel="nofollow">https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/</a>
How is it different than shorting or buying put options and then damaging the company? The tools are already there.
> The gamblers don't seem to care.<p>Which makes me wonder if it is actually just money laundering.
These apps claim to let you turn your knowledge into money. What this means is the insiders get to cash out and the desperate suckers provide the liquidity. I'm amazed they've all gotten away with this for so long.
I (my agents) have been playing with the kalshi and poly market APIsv and whatever your opinion on the markets themselves it does feel like there's a bunch of interesting things to do with such a firehose of realtime data.<p>I hope they stay as open and generous as they are now with programmatic access
I dunno, I feel it's just democratizing insider trading. And as everyone knows, if it has "democratizing" in it, that means it's automatically good.
I didn't bet on the beat this broke on.<p><a href="https://youtu.be/ZN4njIQcSR4?t=1815" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/ZN4njIQcSR4?t=1815</a>