Alex Frankos

What's really significant with the Venezuela case is that it's a Department of Justice case against him.

The government is basically saying, look, we're not going to be totally laissez faire about this.

We really don't want people exploiting these markets to advantage based especially on government, let alone military inside information.

And there's been a lot of question as to whether the Trump administration would go and enforce these things because there's basic questions with prediction markets.

They're so new.

They're so novel.

Are these even securities?

Are these even regulated instruments that fall under existing laws or are they something new and new?

novel that needs new laws written about them or not.

They want informed information to feed through into the market to tell the market, hey, this thing is likely to happen or not happen.

But one of the real tensions among users is there appear to be this pattern of these cases where someone makes a really well-timed bet, makes a lot of money,

And for the people who don't have inside information, they feel like they're at a disadvantage.

But some people say that's the point of these markets, is you want insiders to come in and move the price because that tells you the likelihood of something happening.

The sooner you can get into these indexes, the sooner you have this wall of money coming at your stock.

Right.

Basically, these index funds, which a lot of our listeners are probably invested in, automatically buy whatever is in the index.

And an IPO is always an uncertain process.

You're putting a new company on the stock market.

You don't know how people are going to react.

There's also the issue that a lot of insiders in the company, people who already own shares, are going to sell their shares after the lockup period expires.