Mitch Labiak

And the reason for that being that, you know, as one of the people we spoke to for the BBC story I wrote said, you know, people have always had opinion on anything

but this is quite literally putting your money where your mouth is.

So that sort of helps to create a more accurate polling.

Academics have noticed this as well.

The first prediction market actually operated way back in the 1980s in the US, but it was purely an academic exercise and it wasn't run as a...

As a multi-billion dollar company, it was run as an academic exercise.

Academics would sort of trade a maximum of $100, I think it was, each just to see on who they thought would win the election.

And they found that their prediction markets were more accurate than polling.

And now that they've sort of exploded into the mainstream, as you say, with the 2024 election, so it has proven that at least the last big litmus test, that 2024 election, the prediction markets predicted Donald Trump win when the polls didn't.

So that's definitely one of the defences of them.

Yeah.

I mean, you've hinted at something right there, which is that by and large, people don't make money on this.

So the Wall Street Journal crunched the numbers on this.

67% of profits go to 0.1% of accounts.

The vast majority of people are sharing a minority of the profits.

That's not to say people don't win, but the big winners are this sort of tiny subset of users, which the Wall Street Journal found were using

very sort of professional setups.

They might have had AI bots to help them.

They might have had staff.

In the same way that you expect a large fund that trades oil on the commodities exchange would operate, or a large fund that operates on the stock exchange, you've got very professionalized players quickly entering these prediction markets because there's money to be made.