Kimberly Adams

Our supervisory senior producer is Daisy Palacios.

Nancy Fargali is executive producer of Marketplace Shows.

And Marketplace's vice president and general manager is Neil Cerebro.

Hello, everyone.

I'm Kimberly Adams.

Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.

So as the U.S.

military has engaged in different military operations this year, first in Venezuela, then in Iran, some people have made a lot, and I mean a lot, of money in prediction markets.

And some of these enormous, suspiciously well-timed bets have a lot of people thinking that insider information was at play.

Marketplace's Megan McCarty Carino has been reporting on this, and she's here to make us smart about it.

Megan, welcome back.

Hey, so good to be here.

So folks listening may have seen some of the headlines over the past few months about these big bets and how oddly timed they were.

But for those who haven't, can you give us an idea of the scale of some of these bets that have made people suspect insider information was at play?

So here in the U.S., a key distinction in all of this and whether it like counts as insider trading or not gets into gambling versus trading in commodities.

Can you explain that?

Which is stuff that's normally traded on the markets, like the stock market that we do the numbers on every day here at Marketplace.

These futures contracts that are regulated by the CFTC are regulated, but unlike stocks,

People might be surprised to learn that insider trading on those commodities wasn't actually illegal until 2010.

Why was that?