Ryan Knudson

They bet $10,000 that Travis Scott would not perform.

And they bet $200 that the headliner, Bad Bunny, would open with the song, Titi Me Pregunto,

And 17 of those 19 bets were correct.

The person won almost $17,000.

So based on what you are seeing here on this person's account, what can you deduce about what's going on here?

As prediction markets explode in popularity, bets like these, from people who appear to have inside information, are getting a lot of attention and raising a lot of eyebrows.

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power.

I'm Ryan Knudson.

It's Tuesday, February 17th.

Coming up on the show, prediction markets are taking off and insiders are cashing in.

The concept of prediction markets has existed for years.

The two most popular ones today are Polymarket and Kalshi.

All Polymarket trades are done in crypto, while you can trade on CalSheet in dollars.

And we should say here that Polymarket has a data partnership with Dow Jones, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal.

These days, my social media algorithm is full of videos about these two companies.

All right, so I've got the Polymarket website up to its homepage here, and I'm seeing you can bet on politics, sports, crypto.

You can bet on how many times Elon Musk will tweet in a given time period, what the next jobs report will show, who's going to win the most medals at the Summer Olympics.

There's a ton of stuff on here.

The second coming of Christ aside, these prediction markets have actually been pretty accurate when it comes to elections and economic indicators.

And the idea behind that is that if you have to put money on the line that you think this is going to be the outcome, that's different than just telling a pollster who you're going to vote for because you don't have much of an incentive to be honest.