Alex Goldenberg

This is what economists frequently call an agency problem, a fundamental misalignment between duty and personal incentive.

A military commander should answer to civilian leadership and mission objectives.

But when there's a financial market on the outcome, we're introducing a competing incentive.

I mean, we banned Pete Rose decades ago from baseball for life because he was betting on his own team.

The concern was that the incentive structure was incompatible with his role.

That's the situation we're creating, not in baseball, but active war zones.

The markets are live.

The incentives are incredibly powerful.

And we're now, you know, have to assume that duty will always win out over a year's salary.

It's a great question.

And look, I can't tell you that Moscow or Beijing are actively exploiting these markets right now.

But here's what I can tell you.

If I were running a foreign intelligence service, I'd be paying very close attention.

These markets are essentially open source signals.

You don't need to recruit spies or run risky operations.

You just watch for patterns.

When someone places an unusually large bet on low probability events, what traders or what I call high conviction bets, that's a signal.

For example, if betting volume suddenly spikes on sensitive military operations that's trading at 15% odds, that's interesting.

Someone is betting serious money on something unlikely to happen.

Either they're foolish or they know something.