New online accounts on Polymarket platform betting a total of $70,000 suggest ‘some degree of inside info’
Several accounts on the online platform Polymarket laid bets on a US-Iran ceasefire over the weekend that appeared to show signs of insider knowledge, according to experts.
Eight accounts, all newly created around 21 March, bet a total of nearly $70,000 (£52,000) on there being a ceasefire. They stand to make nearly $820,000 if such a deal is reached before 31 March.
An account that made the same bet was created shortly before the US struck Iran on 28 February. It also placed a winning bet on those strikes, which raised similar questions around insider trading, and so far has bet on nothing else.
The new accounts all appear to have been created late last week, around the time when the US president, Donald Trump, appeared to first double down on war with Iran, then suggest in an after-markets Truth Social post that he was considering “winding down” military operations.
This is exactly as designed. The whole point of a prediction market is to encourage people who are knowledgeable about a subject to expose that knowledge in the form of bets. We should want people with inside information to be doing this to make the predictions more accurate.
If you don’t have inside information or special knowledge then you probably shouldn’t be gambling like that yourself. It’d be like buying stocks on the stock market without knowing anything about the industries the stocks are from.
We should completely outlaw such markets. The incentive to manipulate these things is enormous.
If there were no suckers, there would be no money, no winnings to motivate the insiders. It requires exploitation in order to “function.”
The next step will be stratifying the insiders. Big bettors, people who hear things and think they know things, suckered by a tiny cadre of the innermost circle. Maybe that’s happened already.
Eventually, of course, there will be motivation to spread falsehoods to change the odds in the insider’s favor. Or to outright direct history to take advantage of long odds.
Edit: Oops, my prediction may be behind the curve here. That was fast.