Alex Heath

These markets reward people to go out and do research.

and then bring it into the open market, right?

And over time we get holistically.

So think about, for example, the, okay, whether tariffs are net good or net bad for society, or whether there's gonna be a recession this year or not, right?

Like one way to do this is like you go and do this Bloomberg economist survey and you ask a bunch of experts, hey, what do you think?

And then they give an answer and that's our forecast, right?

That's historically been, this is what we believe to be true.

But it doesn't work that well.

If you compare that to the calcium economic forecast over the last few years, we have been much, much more accurate.

It's just much better kind of gauge of what's going to happen.

And the reason is because it's a very different mechanism, which is now I'm giving an incentive.

I'm rewarding people to actually go out and do research and then come and trade on it, bring it to the market.

And if you think of that incentive at scale, it's holistically making us smarter about, for example, the economy.

It's making us smarter about COVID and whether it's going to come back.

Like maybe this whole COVID episode of whether, hey, COVID is done, COVID is not done.

If they were listening to the markets, we were saying Omicron is going to come back.

There's an Omicron wave and it was going to come back because some traders were doing research and they spent copious amount of times.

They're not necessarily, by the way, like doctors or like people that you would imagine to be the COVID experts.

The people that maybe love the topics and spend so much time in quarantine reading about it.

And then they brought that information to market, which is very useful.