Caitlin Ostroff

Like, unless you are trading with information that isn't public and you are more certain of the outcome, it is a gamble.

So there was one user who started making all of these very correct bets on when strikes would start to happen and when a ceasefire would be called.

And so because of that, people online were quick to latch onto this and be like, this person is doing really, really well at, you know, this sensitive market.

Like, whether Israel will strike Iran is something not many people should know about, but they might know something that the rest of us don't.

The most recent one, major one, was the ousting of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, where, you know, I woke up after New Year's to see that all of a sudden this account had made $400,000 off of betting when Maduro would be ousted.

And you could see the bets leading up to the strikes.

You know, those happened at 2 a.m., and you could see bets being placed right up until about 11 p.m.

the night before.

Hmm.

And they were just, you know, doing more and more of these chunks of bets that this would happen.

Wow.

And so those were kind of the ones that stuck out for us where we were like, we can't say for sure if it's people trading on non-public information, but it looks really kind of... It's hard to imagine.

The odds of someone guessing that correctly and then doubling down in the three hours, like, leading up to... To the actual moment.

In the hours leading up to the spike, yeah, like...

The odds of that are so small that you have to convince me that it's not insider trading at that point.

I mean, I think the main question it raises is, you know, one of the things that I've really been thinking of is how often are people trading on non-public information on these markets?

And, you know, how serious is that?

And that sort of differs a bit depending on who you speak to, because to some degree, these trades on non-public information are somewhat of a feature and not necessarily a quirk.

The idea of prediction markets is that they present themselves as a vehicle to get more accurate information than you might be able to get from traditional sources.

And so if you have a platform where anyone, without saying who they are, can say, I think this is going to happen, I'm putting my money down on it.