They don't have much to say about Kalshi other than "unlike real mainstream journalism, there’s no accountability". Which isn't saying much, because nobody is claiming prediction markets are a type of journalism.
Journalism is one particular way of trying to learn about the world. Academics are another, the scientific method is a third, and so on.
Claiming that something is a better way to learn about the world is NOT the same as claiming it is using a specific method, or part of a specific tradition.
I’m open to being convinced, but if you’re claiming mainstream media has no accountability, I think you need to substantiate that.
I realize there are information bubbles on the internet where this is accepted as truth, but unexamined. Nonsense is everywhere on the internet. I’d be curious how you’d substantiate this.
I really don’t understand how these markets survive a competent DOJ considering the rate they’re having to ban people for “insider trading”. Fully appreciate the Unions position here.
Most competent people at the DOJ have either been fired or left. And the current administration seems to love insider trading, so long as they can be the insiders doing the trading.
Same old story, on a whole new scale. Donny Junior has a piece the numbers game on the east side, so the family makes sure the cops don’t come round asking too many questions…
> Donald Trump Jr. Got A Kalshi Stake For Free— Now It Could Be Worth Billions As Prediction Market Platform Eyes $40 Billion Valuation
> Kalshi handed him equity worth roughly $300,000 when he joined as a strategic adviser in early 2025. ... Kalshi granted him the stake when the company was valued at under $2 billion — less than a tenth of its $22 billion valuation in a funding round last month ...
Um, how does a $300K stake at an "under $2 billion" valuation become "worth billions" with a 10-50x valuation increase?
(Disclaimer: I'm not defending the Trump family in any way, the administration has been absurdly and blatantly corrupt.)
It lasts for now, it won’t survive when the political pendulum swings back. “Make hay grifting while the grifters shine.” is the current MO. “Temporary economic strip mining operation.”
Insider trading is legal in commodities markets. If I am engaged in a hedging transaction I am doing so because I know about risks that I want to offload, and the buyer does also. You don't come to commodities markets without information.
Hedging is not insider trading. Insider trading is trading based on material non-public information in breach of a duty or obtained through fraud. In that sense, it's more of a principal-agent problem.
Also -- hedging is generally not done based on material non-public information, but rather to guard against known risks. Joe the farmer sells a bunch of wheat futures when he plants his wheat, not because he thinks the price will go down, but rather because if it does he goes bankrupt and he'd prefer to accept a known rate-of-return now.
Note that's a US definition — Europe is stricter and draws the line at non-public information [0], aside from certain carveouts and safe harbors. Matt Levine describes this as "theft" (misappropriating nonpublic information) vs. "fairness" (using nonpublic information at all) — iirc if you're on a flight and overhear a passenger in business class talking about an upcoming merger they're working on, that's legal to trade on in the US but illegal in Europe. At least that's what I generally remember about "parity-of-information" theory.
If you and the buyer know about the risks then you’re not making a trade based on material non public information, are you?
If you make a hedging trade while having material knowledge that you withhold from the counterparty… well, that sounds like it could be edging towards fraud. Like taking out life insurance while hiding a medical condition.
But sure, it’s not against the law to do business with a sucker, so there’s degrees here.
Prediction markets are not remotely commodities markets, regardless of whatever the Trump admin says. It’s just gambling without any enforcement on cheating.
Just for context that’s not quite accurate. There certainly is a distinction in the rule versus securities markets, which I know is what you mean.
But it’s more accurate to say participants can trade on lawfully obtained material nonpublic information absent some independent duty not to use it, which is much narrower than saying insider trading is generally legal.
Exactly. Pit mine sees who's buying what and is worried copper will go down. Datacenter people see who's inking deals and are worried it's gonna go up. They both need to get big fancy loans from their bankers to execute their upcoming projects. The bankers won't like to see unbounded risk on their balance sheets. A futures contract exists to solve this problem.
Not that this excuses some of the absurd stuff that goes on on the online betting platforms...
Got really confused as why my granola bar company was signing a deal with the NYT and The Athletic, and why this was deemed so controversial, then I used Google and learned the difference between Kashi and Kalshi.
I hate prediction markets but simultaneously find this a little rich.
I think most people have experienced what Michael Chrichton called Gel Mann Amnesia - the idea that newspapers feel accurate except about topics you know about.
Whenever I read about topics I know about: such as my employer, a political topic I am particular familiar with, etc - the reporting is usually off in what MC called a "wet streets cause rain" kind of way.
I haven't seen any accountability for this kind of reporting. If a newspaper wrote that someone was born in 1980 but it was actually 1985 they may correct that but the broader theme of articles being inherently misleading to reality is rampant and I suspect significantly worse than when MC conceptualized this problem.
That's to say I am not sure there's a practical standard to which a random times writer is held that kalshi isn't to. If anything I think kalshi is more clearly presented as "a bet" vs "the truth" so I don't understand the meat of the grievance.
I would say prediction markets are more dangerous since they don't claim its gambling while sports gambling is much more explicit (not that the industry is a saint by any means)
obviously and definitely true in their current form. But it's maybe worth clarifying that before this last year or two, when Kalshi became an obvious regulatory dodge (including adding sports and really leaning into the gambling demographic), many were interested in prediction markets not just for that purpose: e.g. the rationalist community seems to have had a longstanding interest in the idea, manifold didn't have real money, and predictit (which is like a decade old) had academic origins.
As a tangent, it reminds me a bit of cryptocurrency: in the earliest days the interested parties have a mix of intellectual (can it be done? How can it be done?) and some idealistic (this technology will have utility, like reducing spam or libertarianism for crypto, or giving us a more accurate and precise understanding of the world for prediction markets) values. Of course, as both are directly financial, the third value is that one stands to get rich off of the technology. This third value might be adequately communally suppressed in the beginning, but the force of money gradually makes this third value the only one that matters, and both technologies become net-negatives on humanity.
IEM is still functioning but pretty dead since Kalshi put up election markets. Looking just now I see well under $100 in volume for all of August. (At least when Kalshi first put up those markets it gave me the only opportunity I've had to make a pure arbitrage.)
Might be something the populace is just too dumb to have - the people seem to overwhelmingly prefer their events to be pretty much games of chance (BTC price up/down at 15 minute intervals) or sports.
I figure Kalshi and Polymarket for dead before too long, if only because the "traditional" sportsbooks seem to have much better "government relations".
Do you have any sources for this? My understanding is that all of the discussion about prediction market wildfires are completely speculative, nobody has actually started a wildfire for a prediction market payout yet.
I've been in the desert fighting fires for the last 4 months. The news isn't going rampant with the arson stories for reasons (who knows, scaring the public, informing the public, etc).
Open the watchduty app and start looking into how many fires are currently arson suspected/apprehended and how this is the largest national wildfire year we've ever had.
The Dick and Cleetus methheads doing this stuff aren't the brightest and most well informed tech risk takers out there. Most of them will get caught and never get a dime, who the hell knows how why or else they're causing fires, the FBI isn't investigating anyone. They don't tell us WHY an arson occurred. Who knows how many of these apps exist in other markets, etc. The last global wildfire article I saw said either 86 or 96 arsons were arrested. I can't remember if it was France or in Africa.
This is THE strangest wildfire year anyone has had and the news is nowhere.
I'm not the only ex-tech wildland person, plenty of laid off firefighters right now back to their old lives.
At a minimum, if it was going to be legal why could they not have restricted the advertising like we do with tobacco ads? At this point the sports broadcasts themselves are advertisements.
Its not just the broadcasts are advertisements. Its completely engrained in every professional sports league now. They now all have some kind of multi-year contracts with casino's, betting platforms and prediction markets. This is way beyond advertising now. Our local sports talk show has an hour long show that precedes the pre-game that is 100% all about NFL gambling for Sunday's games.
Not only are you seeing the advertisements for these platforms and their betting apps, you're having a coordinated focus on actively pushing it in a myriad of other ways as well.
Sports gambling exists all around the world and less than 1% of people develop serious addictions, far less than develop alcohol addiction. It's not fair to ban the fun for everyone just because a small subset of people can't control themselves.
Where is that "less than 1%" figure coming from or did you just pull that out from you-know-where?
And alcohol has always been highly accessible. I have 5 stores within a 5 minute walk of me that I can get it from, and that's not to mention all of the restaurants and bars within that same radius.
Addiction is addiction. Alcohol is one object of that addiction. Sports betting can be another. Porn, food, drugs, etc.
What's to say sports betting addiction won't become as severe as alcohol now that it's becoming more accessible to the public?
Under 1% of the population is not the same as under 1% of people exposed, and if we dramatically increase exposure, we probably will proportionally increase problem gambling. Regardless, this is a good point, this isn’t nearly as high as alcoholism or even drug addiction, I suspect.
You haven't addressed the problem of availability. It's one thing to go to the track physically to bet, vs having the track in your pocket available 24/7 with wagers on literally everything.
Do I think betting addiction will be as bad or prevalent as alcholism? Probably not, yet it's worth considering restricting it for social good. Just like we don't let 13 year olds buy bottles of whiskey.
I'm sympathetic to this perspective, but the downstream negative externalities of sports gambling aren't just what happens to gambling addicts. The whole sport starts to revolve around the gambling - including strong incentives for players to "throw" games. I don't think integrity in sports can co-exist with a massive, legal gambling industry.
This is one my biggest problems with sports gambling and prediction markets. It completely negates any sense of fair play. Sports are supposed to be for everyone. Kids should not be exposed to this. You should not be able to advertise services to an audience partially made up of people who legally can’t use them. It’s like putting a gun store right next to a prison and handing out coupons to anyone who walks by… like newly released felons
The stock market isn't fundamentally a gamble. Spending money to buy a share of a company's future dividends is a sound way to invest money and earn a return on it.
The problem with the stock market is when there aren't enough new companies going public to soak up the spigot of all the capital that people want to invest, leading average P/E ratios to increase over time. There is too much money chasing too few earnings. When the underlying fundamentals don't match up, then all that investors are doing is speculating that someone else will be the bigger fool and buy from them at an even more unreasonable price - and that is a gamble.
You want short term trading because you want the prices to be as close to efficient as possible.
You may never trade short term but at some point you are going to buy and at some point you are going to sell. Market being far from efficient one would hurt you there.
So let them trade and discover price. You don't have to play that game but you still benefit.
For one thing because now people who own high-speed low-latency connections to stock markets have no advantage over "normal" people who actually do meaningful work, like being a policeman or nurse.
>people who actually do meaningful work, like being a policeman
Making a sudden event that happened on the other side of the world reflect in the local market price at almost the speed of light is far more meaningful work than going around shooting dark-skinned people.
If this whole efficiency argument means I'm going to make $1 more per month while some lousy traders make $100k more per month, then I'd say: to hell with "efficiency". Fairness and wealth equality are more important to me than $1.
Also considering that these traders will use their $100k in ways that my $1 will become worth even less. For example by buying all the housing in my neighborhood and thereby increasing my rent.
Without that efficiency it'd be like the old days before electronic trading where you're paying 100x larger fees to a crusty old brokerage any time you want to trade.
You do realise that countries other than the USA exist, right? The UK has had various forms of sports gambling legal for nearly 100 years and society hasn't crumbled and neither did sport.
You've been able to gamble on your mobile device for 100 years in the UK?
Modern gambling isn't you talking to a bookie and putting down $100 on your favorite team. That should still be legal. Phone apps which learn your behavior, your favorite teams, the offers you are likely to accept, the time of day that you're most likely to make a bet, etc etc and use that to barrage you with notifications, "free" plays, high paying parlays with horrible odds, should not be.
Society bears the downsides of gambling and gambling addiction, while the casinos gather all of the upside.
"A more recent survey in 2022, conducted by the United Kingdom Gambling Commission found that 'headline problem gambling rate is statistically stable at 0.2%. The moderate risk and low risk rates are also statistically stable at 0.9% and 1.4% respectively.'[45]"
Sports gambling is controlled by FTC in the US. Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket found a loophole where they can run gambling operations under CFTC and and not be controlled by FTC. There needs to be some legislative actions from the Congress to close the loophole.
It's a lazy argument imo. As corrupt as they might be there is way more money to make in the stock market or bond market if you have insider info.
There is little reason for them to go after peanuts in the prediction markets.
Incorrect. Ninth circuit ruled in favor of Nevada State, but earlier this year third circuit ruled in favor of Kalshi. So it's going to the Supreme Court.
All of the above is completely independent from what Congress can or cannot do.
Searched the quote and you neglected to elaborate on how small the number is:
> Health service figures show that from April to September 2024, 1,914 people were treated at NHS gambling clinics. This compares to the previous financial year when a total of 1,389 patients were cared for. In 2022-23 this number was 1,013, and in 2020-21 it was 775 patients.
I get that you're probably trying to make a point that it's bad for everyone in general, but the US is on a completely different level of societal corruption from all of this.
Likely an Amerocentric comment, yes, that assumes gambling can only be as destructive and predatory as it is in the US. I don't know anything about how it works in the UK but it's plausible to me that it's not as harmful a force there, as you say.
Yeah, it's just like being able to take an insurance policy on other people's lives. It's a wonderful idea for all of 15 minutes until people start getting murdered.
> bare minimum of regulation
No amount of regulation will solve the issue when what you can take insurance on is not regulated.
Prediction markets are to insurance the same as crypto is to banking: a speedrun of all the frauds that happened in the past until the perpetrators are sent to jail or regulated so heavily that they are virtually identical to what they were supposed to disrupt.
A great irony here is that Kalshi and media generally are competitors. When I make important decisions (e.g. understanding politics, where to travel and setup companies), I always value betting markets over hearsay (aka media). The former has real money at stake, whereas the latter often has no skin in the game (as well as a other issues; like herd mentality, sensationalism, incentive to tell people what they want to hear rather than what's true).
They are partisan. It's just whoever decides to make the bets. Like the 2022 election situation was just one big whale. There's just nothing about it that makes it inherently non-partisan.
A partisan bet makes the opposite position slightly more profitable, attracting bets which equilibrate the market back at fair prices (i.e. realistic probabilities)
Someone tampered with the weather equipment at Charles de Gaulle airport for a Polymarket bet. This sort of thing is going to become so much more common going forward.
There was also a story about a reporter who wrote a story about a missile strike and people who had bet against a missile strike applied a lot of pressure, including death threats, on the reporter to change his story.
what happened with Bill Simmons bragging about using his daughter's boyfriend to place proxy bets for him on FanDuel (who Bill is partnered with) is endlessly entertaining
Trump Jr. just pumped 300 million into Polymarket and also has a stake in Kalshi so, i'm not sure who thinks the DOJ will really do anything. this is fentanyl on the phone but there will have to be a few examples like some low-levels House members or state senators alongside sports casualites
I find it really interesting that online sports betting, which has been a thing in my country for 15+ years and largely a non-issue, is suddenly a total shitshow once it gets legalised in the US. I feel like the US always takes things too far. I watch quite a few US sports and former athletes giving betting suggestions during broadcasts is absolutely insane. How can you go from being so restrictive to having absolutely no limits overnight? To make matters worse I get the feeling the TV companies here are taking pointers from their US colleagues and starting to force us down the same path.
It was banned by the federal government in 1992 by an act of Congress (with bipartisan consensus and signed into law by a Republican president). The supreme court vote overturning it was also 7-2, with 2 of those 7 appointed by a Democrat president.
Not exactly. The law was weird, and that's why it was overturned. It didn't make sports betting illegal federally, instead it prevented states from "authorizing" it, which the petitioners argued was an unconstitutional intrusion into the lawmaking ability of states in that it prevented them from repealing laws against sports betting that they had previously passed.
The full ruling is at https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-476_dbfi.pdf, and the last paragraph sums it up: "Congress can regulate sports gambling directly, but if it elects not to do so, each State is free to act on its own".
The SCOTUS ruling didn't legalize sports betting; states chose to do that themselves once they were no longer prevented from doing so. Congress could ban it nationwide today, and probably they should.
I am trying to say that they cannot claim that this deal will “threaten our journalistic independence”. It is just kinda funny (and sad) that they claim that while only 32% of U.S. adults said they trust The New York Times as a source of news.
Citizen's United was the nail in the coffin for honest journalism, because it sold out to those with the largest wallets. If you truly want truth in journalism support independent journalists financially, and with your attention. Ignore corporate media.
To me, the rules on how large a media conglomerate could get being changed in favor of allowing the conglomerate to grow even larger did some heavy lifting. Journalism publishers no longer have to compete since their all owned by the same limited number of owners.
Most of the top level comments support scrapping the deal, most of them on the basis that "sports gambling is a cancer." A cancer for whom? I want to take the opposite position: let people do whatever they want, as long as they bear the consequences of their decisions instead of socializing the risk. You don't like betting or gambling? Great, then don't do it. But forcing your preferences on others is not the way.
Sports betting has externalities that are hard to push back into the original bettor and the bookie. Solving those externalities involves regulation in some form, whether by regulation or heavy taxes.
How do you protect the risk from falling on society? I think that is the crux of it, it is not something you can cleanly separate which is where regulation steps in. The question is, how much money and influence can these companies shore up before that regulation hits?
As a practical matter when someone gambles away their life savings we aren't going to let them starve in the streets, we're going to give them public assistance.
Despite my libertarian leanings I have to acknowledge that sports betting is a disaster for people with low impulse control, and while in theory prediction markets are useful for aggregating knowledge, in reality they've been taken over by degenerate gamblers and fraudsters.
>They are not the ones who has to bear the financial responsibilities of the company.
When the company does poorly, who ends up hurting more? Is it the workers that get laid off, the executives that get another bonus, or the owner that remains a billionaire?
The company loses $, not workers. Workers get paid regardless whether the company loses money or not.
Union workers rarely ever get fired over this especially.
Unfortunately, this shows how much facts and reality have been turned into nothing more than a loyalty test by both sides of our political debate.
> A partnership between The Times (for The Athletic) and Kalshi would also provide validation that their prediction market data should be taken seriously as an indicator of the future. Facts prove otherwise.
They could have objected to the partnership on any number of valid grounds, like the fact that predicting the outcome of sporting events provides no valid benefit and can only ever be gambling, or that the integration is probably going to be pretty lame and provide no benefit to the reader.
Instead, they felt compelled to make a trivially false claim, the claim that prediction markets do not accurately predict the future. It's trivial to prove that this claim is false, because if it were true, it would be very easy for anyone to make a huge amount of money on prediction markets.
It's even more telling why they made this claim, to avoid "providing validation". Not because of any harms caused by sports gambling addiction, but because it could provide a tiny piece of political ammunition to a product that has been slotted into the opposing political tribe. Reading this statement, one gets the impression that they would be completely OK with sports gambling on The Athletic, as long as it was provided by a more traditional casino-style bookie operation.
I'm guessing that anyone in the room when this statement was written who even brought up the question of the facts could be safely sidelined and ostracized by the union as being insufficiently loyal to their political position.
> the claim that prediction markets do not accurately predict the future. It's trivial to prove that this claim is false, because if it were true, it would be very easy for anyone to make a huge amount of money on prediction markets
I'm not intimately familiar with prediction markets (I avoid gambling), but can you explain how this is the case? If the market unpredictably incorrect, then shouldn't it be difficult / impossible to predict precisely which bets will be wrong in a way that would allow you to profit from them?
Ultimately isn't it the case that all they're doing (at least from a prediction point of view) is aggregating (better or worse informed) guesses? Excepting outright corruption / insider trading of course. This might tell you a great deal about what the set of users of a given prediction market expect as an outcome for a given prediction, but it doesn't tell you anything about the future itself. Any more than the stock market (fails to) tell us to pull out money out the day before a crash.
I think a good toy example here could be a market on a coinflip. Let's say heads pays out $1 and tails pays out $0, and people can buy and sell contracts that resolve this way. Naively, people might think that this is a 50/50 outcome, so if anyone wanted to buy or sell this contract for some reason, they'd likely be able to find someone to trade with them around the price of 50 cents.
Now, say that you somehow knew that this coin wasn't a fair coin, and instead was weighted 55% to fall on heads, 45% tails. Then, you would be happy buying these contracts for 50 cents -- given the contract pays out $1 if the coin lands on heads, and you know there's a 55% chance of heads, the expected price for the contract is 55 cents, and you make 5 cents in expectancy.
So, if you had information about the "fair value" of this contract, telling you that the price should be 55 cents, you'd be incentivized to buy the contract at prices below 55 cents. If the contract was trading at any price other than 55 cents, then, from your perspective, the price would be incorrect. And if the price is incorrect, then you'd be able to make money trading: buying for prices below 55 cents and selling at prices above 55 cents. And finally, as a result of your trading, you'd provide one-sided demand to the market, pushing the price closer to the actual correct price.
From this simple mechanism, wherein everyone who has information is incentivized to make money on their information by trading, prices start getting pushed to accurately reflect the aggregate of the information that everyone possesses! So in markets, there is a profit incentive to provide information, and this makes prices more accurate.
Finally, I think a common misconception is that prediction markets are sometimes wrong, as events priced at low probabilities sometimes happen. For example, in the 2024 election, Trump was trading at probabilities below 50%, but he still won! However, this is conflating present information about the future with future results. Given the earlier example about the biased 55% coin -- before we flip the coin, the best thing we can possibly say about the future really just is that there's a 55% chance of heads and 45% chance of tails. If we then flip the coin and it lands on tails, that doesn't mean we were incorrect -- it was just the best statement about the future that we could have possibly made.
Prediction markets -- or really any price system -- aggregate the best available information about the future. If you can confidently state that they are wrong -- that their best available information about the future is inaccurate -- then you should be trading and making money.
Does that clear things up a bit for you? It's a longer response, but I think it might address some of the confusion that you (or anyone else) might have regarding what people actually mean when they say that these prices predict the future.
> Instead, they felt compelled to make a trivially false claim, the claim that prediction markets do not accurately predict the future. It's trivial to prove that this claim is false, because if it were true, it would be very easy for anyone to make a huge amount of money on prediction markets.
Isn’t that what’s actually happening though? Traders are making real money from bad predictions?
“These are the Sharps actually making money on prediction markets” Odd Lots podcast (Bloomberg) 2026 https://youtu.be/MFAnQpdgkZE
Christ, just say you are conservative and don't like unions and their political stances. 'Accuracy' doesn't matter at all when it comes to assessing harm, but the existence of a market signal itself can change outcomes, and then much vaunted 'accuracy' becomes a mechanism for fraud in a new and different way.
Even taking your nitpick a little bit seriously, behold:
> Retail prediction market traders pick winners 51.3% of the time yet lose money; automated traders achieve coin-flip accuracy yet earn $133 million.
The entire enterprise exists to move money from gamblers to companies. The externalities (suicide, social degradation) of this transaction is bourne by society.
In practical terms commercial prediction markets are unregulated gambling. That's where the money comes from. Stapling a vitamin C packet to your cigarette box doesn't diminish that you're selling cigarettes.
Your whole comment misses the point of the sport. It is not effective to look for the most accurate or rhetorically tested point, the goal is to rally as large a group around a point that dosent make them look like hypocrites, or materially clashes with how they present their identity in other parts of their lives.
The linked article is pretty interesting:
> found a pattern of [Polymarket] sharing false and misleading information
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/20/technology/polymarket-soc...
They don't have much to say about Kalshi other than "unlike real mainstream journalism, there’s no accountability". Which isn't saying much, because nobody is claiming prediction markets are a type of journalism.
> nobody is claiming prediction markets are a type of journalism.
James Surowiecki wrote an entire book essentially saying otherwise.
James Surowiecki has been dismissive about these prediction markets actually meeting the criteria for the Wisdom of the Crowds.
This website has been full of people that say it's better than journalism, so I don't think you're really capturing the entirety of the dynamic
Journalism is one particular way of trying to learn about the world. Academics are another, the scientific method is a third, and so on.
Claiming that something is a better way to learn about the world is NOT the same as claiming it is using a specific method, or part of a specific tradition.
And I hope nobody is claiming that mainstream journalism has any accountability
I do.
I’m open to being convinced, but if you’re claiming mainstream media has no accountability, I think you need to substantiate that.
I realize there are information bubbles on the internet where this is accepted as truth, but unexamined. Nonsense is everywhere on the internet. I’d be curious how you’d substantiate this.
i'm guessing that by your definition almost nothing has any accountability
I really don’t understand how these markets survive a competent DOJ considering the rate they’re having to ban people for “insider trading”. Fully appreciate the Unions position here.
Most competent people at the DOJ have either been fired or left. And the current administration seems to love insider trading, so long as they can be the insiders doing the trading.
I'll leave this here, Donald Trump Jr got a free stake in Kalshi. https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/options/articles/donald-tr...
Same old story, on a whole new scale. Donny Junior has a piece the numbers game on the east side, so the family makes sure the cops don’t come round asking too many questions…
also known as a bribe
> Donald Trump Jr. Got A Kalshi Stake For Free— Now It Could Be Worth Billions As Prediction Market Platform Eyes $40 Billion Valuation
> Kalshi handed him equity worth roughly $300,000 when he joined as a strategic adviser in early 2025. ... Kalshi granted him the stake when the company was valued at under $2 billion — less than a tenth of its $22 billion valuation in a funding round last month ...
Um, how does a $300K stake at an "under $2 billion" valuation become "worth billions" with a 10-50x valuation increase?
(Disclaimer: I'm not defending the Trump family in any way, the administration has been absurdly and blatantly corrupt.)
It lasts for now, it won’t survive when the political pendulum swings back. “Make hay grifting while the grifters shine.” is the current MO. “Temporary economic strip mining operation.”
"Gather ye rosebuds while ye may" comes to mind
Grift while the grifting’s good.
https://news.kalshi.com/p/donald-trump-jr-strategic-advisor
> a competent DOJ
The question answers itself.
Insider trading is legal in commodities markets. If I am engaged in a hedging transaction I am doing so because I know about risks that I want to offload, and the buyer does also. You don't come to commodities markets without information.
Hedging is not insider trading. Insider trading is trading based on material non-public information in breach of a duty or obtained through fraud. In that sense, it's more of a principal-agent problem.
Also -- hedging is generally not done based on material non-public information, but rather to guard against known risks. Joe the farmer sells a bunch of wheat futures when he plants his wheat, not because he thinks the price will go down, but rather because if it does he goes bankrupt and he'd prefer to accept a known rate-of-return now.
Note that's a US definition — Europe is stricter and draws the line at non-public information [0], aside from certain carveouts and safe harbors. Matt Levine describes this as "theft" (misappropriating nonpublic information) vs. "fairness" (using nonpublic information at all) — iirc if you're on a flight and overhear a passenger in business class talking about an upcoming merger they're working on, that's legal to trade on in the US but illegal in Europe. At least that's what I generally remember about "parity-of-information" theory.
[0] https://blogs.law.ox.ac.uk/oblb/blog-post/2024/01/insider-de...
If you and the buyer know about the risks then you’re not making a trade based on material non public information, are you?
If you make a hedging trade while having material knowledge that you withhold from the counterparty… well, that sounds like it could be edging towards fraud. Like taking out life insurance while hiding a medical condition.
But sure, it’s not against the law to do business with a sucker, so there’s degrees here.
John Tuld, in Margin Call:
Sam Rogers: And you're selling something that you know has no value.
John Tuld: We are selling to willing buyers at the current fair market price.
Prediction markets are not remotely commodities markets, regardless of whatever the Trump admin says. It’s just gambling without any enforcement on cheating.
Just for context that’s not quite accurate. There certainly is a distinction in the rule versus securities markets, which I know is what you mean.
But it’s more accurate to say participants can trade on lawfully obtained material nonpublic information absent some independent duty not to use it, which is much narrower than saying insider trading is generally legal.
Exactly. Pit mine sees who's buying what and is worried copper will go down. Datacenter people see who's inking deals and are worried it's gonna go up. They both need to get big fancy loans from their bankers to execute their upcoming projects. The bankers won't like to see unbounded risk on their balance sheets. A futures contract exists to solve this problem.
Not that this excuses some of the absurd stuff that goes on on the online betting platforms...
Corruption
> competent DOJ
Answered your own question.
Lobbying
Ken Paxton went after gambling in Texas but stays hands off on Kalshi | https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/03/ken-paxton-kalshi-t...
"Paxton didn’t sign on to attempts to regulate Kalshi after the prediction market platform and its CEO donated to him and his PAC."
Got really confused as why my granola bar company was signing a deal with the NYT and The Athletic, and why this was deemed so controversial, then I used Google and learned the difference between Kashi and Kalshi.
This is about stopping a potential deal (https://frontofficesports.com/article/the-athletic-serious-t...), nothing finalized yet. They have allegedly abandoned the idea and claim that isn't because of the union demands: https://frontofficesports.com/article/new-york-times-union-k....
I hate prediction markets but simultaneously find this a little rich.
I think most people have experienced what Michael Chrichton called Gel Mann Amnesia - the idea that newspapers feel accurate except about topics you know about.
Whenever I read about topics I know about: such as my employer, a political topic I am particular familiar with, etc - the reporting is usually off in what MC called a "wet streets cause rain" kind of way.
I haven't seen any accountability for this kind of reporting. If a newspaper wrote that someone was born in 1980 but it was actually 1985 they may correct that but the broader theme of articles being inherently misleading to reality is rampant and I suspect significantly worse than when MC conceptualized this problem.
That's to say I am not sure there's a practical standard to which a random times writer is held that kalshi isn't to. If anything I think kalshi is more clearly presented as "a bet" vs "the truth" so I don't understand the meat of the grievance.
Sports gambling is a cancer, as are prediction markets. None of it should've been legalized and all of it should be banned.
I would say prediction markets are more dangerous since they don't claim its gambling while sports gambling is much more explicit (not that the industry is a saint by any means)
It's also an obvious and cynical regulatory dodge. Prediction markets make the bulk of their profit from sports betting.
obviously and definitely true in their current form. But it's maybe worth clarifying that before this last year or two, when Kalshi became an obvious regulatory dodge (including adding sports and really leaning into the gambling demographic), many were interested in prediction markets not just for that purpose: e.g. the rationalist community seems to have had a longstanding interest in the idea, manifold didn't have real money, and predictit (which is like a decade old) had academic origins.
As a tangent, it reminds me a bit of cryptocurrency: in the earliest days the interested parties have a mix of intellectual (can it be done? How can it be done?) and some idealistic (this technology will have utility, like reducing spam or libertarianism for crypto, or giving us a more accurate and precise understanding of the world for prediction markets) values. Of course, as both are directly financial, the third value is that one stands to get rich off of the technology. This third value might be adequately communally suppressed in the beginning, but the force of money gradually makes this third value the only one that matters, and both technologies become net-negatives on humanity.
Iowa Electronic Markets still exists. No need to give the commercial prediction markets any leeway.
IEM is still functioning but pretty dead since Kalshi put up election markets. Looking just now I see well under $100 in volume for all of August. (At least when Kalshi first put up those markets it gave me the only opportunity I've had to make a pure arbitrage.)
Might be something the populace is just too dumb to have - the people seem to overwhelmingly prefer their events to be pretty much games of chance (BTC price up/down at 15 minute intervals) or sports.
I figure Kalshi and Polymarket for dead before too long, if only because the "traditional" sportsbooks seem to have much better "government relations".
>the rationalist community seems to have had a longstanding interest in the idea
Easiest way to know its just valueless
Predication markets are literally causing people to start wildfires across the globe, I thought it was just a USA thing going on, but it's global.
Do you have any sources for this? My understanding is that all of the discussion about prediction market wildfires are completely speculative, nobody has actually started a wildfire for a prediction market payout yet.
It used to be out-of-work firefighters doing it for a paycheque. Now I guess they can collect without leaving the couch.
If you win this bet, does the payout come delivered to your door by the police and fire chief?
I've been in the desert fighting fires for the last 4 months. The news isn't going rampant with the arson stories for reasons (who knows, scaring the public, informing the public, etc).
Open the watchduty app and start looking into how many fires are currently arson suspected/apprehended and how this is the largest national wildfire year we've ever had.
The Dick and Cleetus methheads doing this stuff aren't the brightest and most well informed tech risk takers out there. Most of them will get caught and never get a dime, who the hell knows how why or else they're causing fires, the FBI isn't investigating anyone. They don't tell us WHY an arson occurred. Who knows how many of these apps exist in other markets, etc. The last global wildfire article I saw said either 86 or 96 arsons were arrested. I can't remember if it was France or in Africa.
This is THE strangest wildfire year anyone has had and the news is nowhere.
I'm not the only ex-tech wildland person, plenty of laid off firefighters right now back to their old lives.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/17/climate/betting-wildfires-pol...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/14/arrested-suspi...
At a minimum, if it was going to be legal why could they not have restricted the advertising like we do with tobacco ads? At this point the sports broadcasts themselves are advertisements.
Its not just the broadcasts are advertisements. Its completely engrained in every professional sports league now. They now all have some kind of multi-year contracts with casino's, betting platforms and prediction markets. This is way beyond advertising now. Our local sports talk show has an hour long show that precedes the pre-game that is 100% all about NFL gambling for Sunday's games.
Not only are you seeing the advertisements for these platforms and their betting apps, you're having a coordinated focus on actively pushing it in a myriad of other ways as well.
Sports gambling exists all around the world and less than 1% of people develop serious addictions, far less than develop alcohol addiction. It's not fair to ban the fun for everyone just because a small subset of people can't control themselves.
Where is that "less than 1%" figure coming from or did you just pull that out from you-know-where?
And alcohol has always been highly accessible. I have 5 stores within a 5 minute walk of me that I can get it from, and that's not to mention all of the restaurants and bars within that same radius.
Addiction is addiction. Alcohol is one object of that addiction. Sports betting can be another. Porn, food, drugs, etc.
What's to say sports betting addiction won't become as severe as alcohol now that it's becoming more accessible to the public?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_gambling_in_the_Uni...
>What's to say sports betting addiction won't become as severe as alcohol now that it's becoming more accessible to the public?
Because it's been accessible for over a hundred years in many countries, from 1861 in the case of Australian horse race betting.
Under 1% of the population is not the same as under 1% of people exposed, and if we dramatically increase exposure, we probably will proportionally increase problem gambling. Regardless, this is a good point, this isn’t nearly as high as alcoholism or even drug addiction, I suspect.
It's not nearly as available as alcohol or drugs. Of course the percentage will be lower.
You haven't addressed the problem of availability. It's one thing to go to the track physically to bet, vs having the track in your pocket available 24/7 with wagers on literally everything.
Do I think betting addiction will be as bad or prevalent as alcholism? Probably not, yet it's worth considering restricting it for social good. Just like we don't let 13 year olds buy bottles of whiskey.
Right, you could just walk down the street in 1861 and place a bet the way you could walk down the street and buy alcohol.
Wait, no. You couldn't.
I'm sympathetic to this perspective, but the downstream negative externalities of sports gambling aren't just what happens to gambling addicts. The whole sport starts to revolve around the gambling - including strong incentives for players to "throw" games. I don't think integrity in sports can co-exist with a massive, legal gambling industry.
This is one my biggest problems with sports gambling and prediction markets. It completely negates any sense of fair play. Sports are supposed to be for everyone. Kids should not be exposed to this. You should not be able to advertise services to an audience partially made up of people who legally can’t use them. It’s like putting a gun store right next to a prison and handing out coupons to anyone who walks by… like newly released felons
It should have stopped at Vegas. No reservations exception. Vegas only. No online. No OTB. Vegas only.
True absolute cancer on society
have you seen stock market these days?
The stock market isn't fundamentally a gamble. Spending money to buy a share of a company's future dividends is a sound way to invest money and earn a return on it.
The problem with the stock market is when there aren't enough new companies going public to soak up the spigot of all the capital that people want to invest, leading average P/E ratios to increase over time. There is too much money chasing too few earnings. When the underlying fundamentals don't match up, then all that investors are doing is speculating that someone else will be the bigger fool and buy from them at an even more unreasonable price - and that is a gamble.
Yeah, we hate that too man. It's just not the topic at hand.
Why do you hate it? It’s a great way for average person to get share in the profits of giant corporations.
Is the stock market able to distinguish cancerous vs non-cancerous growth?
Well, long term trading is what we should stimulate because it corresponds to investments based on insights in the underlying companies.
Short term trading, however ...
Maybe we should just put limits on how short one can own a stock (?)
You want short term trading because you want the prices to be as close to efficient as possible. You may never trade short term but at some point you are going to buy and at some point you are going to sell. Market being far from efficient one would hurt you there. So let them trade and discover price. You don't have to play that game but you still benefit.
How much will it hurt me? Maybe I'm OK with being hurt through the markets if it means the world is a saner and more fair place?
Ok, and how does banning short-term trading make the world more fair?
For one thing because now people who own high-speed low-latency connections to stock markets have no advantage over "normal" people who actually do meaningful work, like being a policeman or nurse.
Price discovery and increasing liquidity is meaningful work.
To a very limited extent, maybe.
>people who actually do meaningful work, like being a policeman
Making a sudden event that happened on the other side of the world reflect in the local market price at almost the speed of light is far more meaningful work than going around shooting dark-skinned people.
Long-term traders don't need the price to be as "efficient" as possible by definition.
Maybe an extra 1% spread doesn't matter if you buy and hold for 50 years, but for 2 years it absolutely does.
> You want short term trading because you want the prices to be as close to efficient as possible
But do I want the prices to be as efficient as possible?
If this whole efficiency argument means I'm going to make $1 more per month while some lousy traders make $100k more per month, then I'd say: to hell with "efficiency". Fairness and wealth equality are more important to me than $1.
Also considering that these traders will use their $100k in ways that my $1 will become worth even less. For example by buying all the housing in my neighborhood and thereby increasing my rent.
Without that efficiency it'd be like the old days before electronic trading where you're paying 100x larger fees to a crusty old brokerage any time you want to trade.
Doesn't matter. Banning short term trading will also reduce # trade events, so the fees don't matter.
Why would the fees be bigger? The old brokerages had to do manual work to put the bid on the trading floor.
Electronic trading doesn't need to go away. The trade itself might take some time instead of being functionally instant, but that's fine.
It’s amazing how successful populism is, even HN is now full of populistic comments.
What makes your comment better or less "populist" than mine? What does populism even have to do with it?
Yes. It feels more and more like a casino as time goes by.
would love to see if there is any data if stocks are more volatile now for ai related stocks
You do realise that countries other than the USA exist, right? The UK has had various forms of sports gambling legal for nearly 100 years and society hasn't crumbled and neither did sport.
You've been able to gamble on your mobile device for 100 years in the UK?
Modern gambling isn't you talking to a bookie and putting down $100 on your favorite team. That should still be legal. Phone apps which learn your behavior, your favorite teams, the offers you are likely to accept, the time of day that you're most likely to make a bet, etc etc and use that to barrage you with notifications, "free" plays, high paying parlays with horrible odds, should not be.
Society bears the downsides of gambling and gambling addiction, while the casinos gather all of the upside.
Finally... https://www.thalamos.co.uk/resources/gambling-addiction-rela...
> NHS gambling clinics have experienced a rise of 130% in referrals in a year, leading to a large increase in the number of support locations.
Seems like the UK is also experiencing a large increase in problems from modern gambling systems.
Out of curiosity, why should sports betting via a bookie be legal in the US? Currently it is not.
"A more recent survey in 2022, conducted by the United Kingdom Gambling Commission found that 'headline problem gambling rate is statistically stable at 0.2%. The moderate risk and low risk rates are also statistically stable at 0.9% and 1.4% respectively.'[45]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_gambling_in_the_Uni...
The Thalamos link describes a trend from 2023 to 2024. This would not be reflected in a survey from 2022.
Sports gambling is controlled by FTC in the US. Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket found a loophole where they can run gambling operations under CFTC and and not be controlled by FTC. There needs to be some legislative actions from the Congress to close the loophole.
> Congress to close the loophole
But i think one of the prediction markets more important uses is to enable insider trading for the current administration.
It's a lazy argument imo. As corrupt as they might be there is way more money to make in the stock market or bond market if you have insider info. There is little reason for them to go after peanuts in the prediction markets.
What are the odds on the prediction market that this will happen?
Nothing needs to be done, Kalshi has no loophole. The Ninth Circuit ruled on exactly this last week.
Incorrect. Ninth circuit ruled in favor of Nevada State, but earlier this year third circuit ruled in favor of Kalshi. So it's going to the Supreme Court.
All of the above is completely independent from what Congress can or cannot do.
America is not the UK and its citizens are not capable of regulating themselves in the face of this sort of exploitation.
> NHS gambling clinics have experienced a rise of 130% in referrals in a year, leading to a large increase in the number of support locations.
Sounds like the enlightened citizens of the UK aren't either?
Searched the quote and you neglected to elaborate on how small the number is:
> Health service figures show that from April to September 2024, 1,914 people were treated at NHS gambling clinics. This compares to the previous financial year when a total of 1,389 patients were cared for. In 2022-23 this number was 1,013, and in 2020-21 it was 775 patients.
I get that you're probably trying to make a point that it's bad for everyone in general, but the US is on a completely different level of societal corruption from all of this.
I think that's a hilarious statement given how they drink in the UK
Imagine two siblings, one who can handle the freedom of choosing their own bedtime and one who cannot.
I don't see any country limitation in the original comment.
Likely an Amerocentric comment, yes, that assumes gambling can only be as destructive and predatory as it is in the US. I don't know anything about how it works in the UK but it's plausible to me that it's not as harmful a force there, as you say.
The cancerous Wikileaks which also leaked news just like prediction markets has also been eliminated. I hope you celebrated.
Prediction markets are a wonderful idea that at the moment is strongly lacking in prestige signals, bare minimum of regulation and liquidity.
> Prediction markets are a wonderful idea
Yeah, it's just like being able to take an insurance policy on other people's lives. It's a wonderful idea for all of 15 minutes until people start getting murdered.
> bare minimum of regulation
No amount of regulation will solve the issue when what you can take insurance on is not regulated.
Prediction markets are to insurance the same as crypto is to banking: a speedrun of all the frauds that happened in the past until the perpetrators are sent to jail or regulated so heavily that they are virtually identical to what they were supposed to disrupt.
What an enormously tendentious and underinformed take.
"a wonderful idea" -- some hyperbole there.
This future in illustration...
https://bsky.app/profile/beanytuesday.bsky.social/post/3mllq...
CNN also has a Kalshi deal.
https://news.kalshi.com/p/kalshi-cnn-prediction-market-partn...
A great irony here is that Kalshi and media generally are competitors. When I make important decisions (e.g. understanding politics, where to travel and setup companies), I always value betting markets over hearsay (aka media). The former has real money at stake, whereas the latter often has no skin in the game (as well as a other issues; like herd mentality, sensationalism, incentive to tell people what they want to hear rather than what's true).
Prediction markets as a new source are politically unbiased and nonpartisan , and this is what the establishment people here don't like.
They are partisan. It's just whoever decides to make the bets. Like the 2022 election situation was just one big whale. There's just nothing about it that makes it inherently non-partisan.
A partisan bet makes the opposite position slightly more profitable, attracting bets which equilibrate the market back at fair prices (i.e. realistic probabilities)
Sports gambling is a cancer for every sports institution and this protest is a step in the right direction.
Sports is fundamentally entertainment. Let people do what they want.
Agreed. They should not be tied or linked or it.
LETS GO MAKE SOME $$$
Someone tampered with the weather equipment at Charles de Gaulle airport for a Polymarket bet. This sort of thing is going to become so much more common going forward.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/23/hairdryer-or-l...
On another note, I had no idea the athletic was owned by NY Times.
There was also a story about a reporter who wrote a story about a missile strike and people who had bet against a missile strike applied a lot of pressure, including death threats, on the reporter to change his story.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/03/17/israel-...
I feel some sports only exist because of gambling.
Horse racing?
what happened with Bill Simmons bragging about using his daughter's boyfriend to place proxy bets for him on FanDuel (who Bill is partnered with) is endlessly entertaining
Trump Jr. just pumped 300 million into Polymarket and also has a stake in Kalshi so, i'm not sure who thinks the DOJ will really do anything. this is fentanyl on the phone but there will have to be a few examples like some low-levels House members or state senators alongside sports casualites
Another reason to question the judgement of Meredith Kopit Levien / the younger Sulzberger...
I find it really interesting that online sports betting, which has been a thing in my country for 15+ years and largely a non-issue, is suddenly a total shitshow once it gets legalised in the US. I feel like the US always takes things too far. I watch quite a few US sports and former athletes giving betting suggestions during broadcasts is absolutely insane. How can you go from being so restrictive to having absolutely no limits overnight? To make matters worse I get the feeling the TV companies here are taking pointers from their US colleagues and starting to force us down the same path.
>How can you go from being so restrictive to having absolutely no limits overnight?
In 2018, the US Supreme Court said the federal law preventing it was illegal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy_v._National_Collegiate_...
It was banned by the federal government in 1992 by an act of Congress (with bipartisan consensus and signed into law by a Republican president). The supreme court vote overturning it was also 7-2, with 2 of those 7 appointed by a Democrat president.
It was banned by the federal government
Not exactly. The law was weird, and that's why it was overturned. It didn't make sports betting illegal federally, instead it prevented states from "authorizing" it, which the petitioners argued was an unconstitutional intrusion into the lawmaking ability of states in that it prevented them from repealing laws against sports betting that they had previously passed.
The full ruling is at https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-476_dbfi.pdf, and the last paragraph sums it up: "Congress can regulate sports gambling directly, but if it elects not to do so, each State is free to act on its own".
The SCOTUS ruling didn't legalize sports betting; states chose to do that themselves once they were no longer prevented from doing so. Congress could ban it nationwide today, and probably they should.
The only thing I know is that journalism stopped being independent and unbiased a long, long time ago.
Interesting, but what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?
I am trying to say that they cannot claim that this deal will “threaten our journalistic independence”. It is just kinda funny (and sad) that they claim that while only 32% of U.S. adults said they trust The New York Times as a source of news.
https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/feature/news-media-tr...
It seems like you should probably spend some effort on trying to learn at least a few more things?
Citizen's United was the nail in the coffin for honest journalism, because it sold out to those with the largest wallets. If you truly want truth in journalism support independent journalists financially, and with your attention. Ignore corporate media.
How did Citizen's United affect journalism?
To me, the rules on how large a media conglomerate could get being changed in favor of allowing the conglomerate to grow even larger did some heavy lifting. Journalism publishers no longer have to compete since their all owned by the same limited number of owners.
Most of the top level comments support scrapping the deal, most of them on the basis that "sports gambling is a cancer." A cancer for whom? I want to take the opposite position: let people do whatever they want, as long as they bear the consequences of their decisions instead of socializing the risk. You don't like betting or gambling? Great, then don't do it. But forcing your preferences on others is not the way.
What happens when a husband decides to risk the mortgage payment on a sports bet and loses? Now the wife and kids are evicted.
Or maybe he lives alone and is now homeless. But now we have a man living out of his car, or worse, homeless and begging on the corner.
The problem with allowing people to do whatever they want is that risks are often socialized.
How does this happen with an online app? I understand how it happens when you place a bet with the local bookie.
Sports betting has externalities that are hard to push back into the original bettor and the bookie. Solving those externalities involves regulation in some form, whether by regulation or heavy taxes.
How do you protect the risk from falling on society? I think that is the crux of it, it is not something you can cleanly separate which is where regulation steps in. The question is, how much money and influence can these companies shore up before that regulation hits?
As a practical matter when someone gambles away their life savings we aren't going to let them starve in the streets, we're going to give them public assistance.
Despite my libertarian leanings I have to acknowledge that sports betting is a disaster for people with low impulse control, and while in theory prediction markets are useful for aggregating knowledge, in reality they've been taken over by degenerate gamblers and fraudsters.
This is where stupid unions rubs me the wrong way.
Unions are for improving worker conditions such as getting the right pay, and right working environment.
They want to "run" the company themselves. Some might argue they are for keeping their current working env without Kalshi.
They are not the ones who has to bear the financial responsibilities of the company. They can shove it and just move on.
>They are not the ones who has to bear the financial responsibilities of the company.
When the company does poorly, who ends up hurting more? Is it the workers that get laid off, the executives that get another bonus, or the owner that remains a billionaire?
The company loses $, not workers. Workers get paid regardless whether the company loses money or not. Union workers rarely ever get fired over this especially.
Unfortunately, this shows how much facts and reality have been turned into nothing more than a loyalty test by both sides of our political debate.
> A partnership between The Times (for The Athletic) and Kalshi would also provide validation that their prediction market data should be taken seriously as an indicator of the future. Facts prove otherwise.
They could have objected to the partnership on any number of valid grounds, like the fact that predicting the outcome of sporting events provides no valid benefit and can only ever be gambling, or that the integration is probably going to be pretty lame and provide no benefit to the reader.
Instead, they felt compelled to make a trivially false claim, the claim that prediction markets do not accurately predict the future. It's trivial to prove that this claim is false, because if it were true, it would be very easy for anyone to make a huge amount of money on prediction markets.
It's even more telling why they made this claim, to avoid "providing validation". Not because of any harms caused by sports gambling addiction, but because it could provide a tiny piece of political ammunition to a product that has been slotted into the opposing political tribe. Reading this statement, one gets the impression that they would be completely OK with sports gambling on The Athletic, as long as it was provided by a more traditional casino-style bookie operation.
I'm guessing that anyone in the room when this statement was written who even brought up the question of the facts could be safely sidelined and ostracized by the union as being insufficiently loyal to their political position.
> the claim that prediction markets do not accurately predict the future. It's trivial to prove that this claim is false, because if it were true, it would be very easy for anyone to make a huge amount of money on prediction markets
I'm not intimately familiar with prediction markets (I avoid gambling), but can you explain how this is the case? If the market unpredictably incorrect, then shouldn't it be difficult / impossible to predict precisely which bets will be wrong in a way that would allow you to profit from them?
Ultimately isn't it the case that all they're doing (at least from a prediction point of view) is aggregating (better or worse informed) guesses? Excepting outright corruption / insider trading of course. This might tell you a great deal about what the set of users of a given prediction market expect as an outcome for a given prediction, but it doesn't tell you anything about the future itself. Any more than the stock market (fails to) tell us to pull out money out the day before a crash.
I think a good toy example here could be a market on a coinflip. Let's say heads pays out $1 and tails pays out $0, and people can buy and sell contracts that resolve this way. Naively, people might think that this is a 50/50 outcome, so if anyone wanted to buy or sell this contract for some reason, they'd likely be able to find someone to trade with them around the price of 50 cents.
Now, say that you somehow knew that this coin wasn't a fair coin, and instead was weighted 55% to fall on heads, 45% tails. Then, you would be happy buying these contracts for 50 cents -- given the contract pays out $1 if the coin lands on heads, and you know there's a 55% chance of heads, the expected price for the contract is 55 cents, and you make 5 cents in expectancy.
So, if you had information about the "fair value" of this contract, telling you that the price should be 55 cents, you'd be incentivized to buy the contract at prices below 55 cents. If the contract was trading at any price other than 55 cents, then, from your perspective, the price would be incorrect. And if the price is incorrect, then you'd be able to make money trading: buying for prices below 55 cents and selling at prices above 55 cents. And finally, as a result of your trading, you'd provide one-sided demand to the market, pushing the price closer to the actual correct price.
From this simple mechanism, wherein everyone who has information is incentivized to make money on their information by trading, prices start getting pushed to accurately reflect the aggregate of the information that everyone possesses! So in markets, there is a profit incentive to provide information, and this makes prices more accurate.
Finally, I think a common misconception is that prediction markets are sometimes wrong, as events priced at low probabilities sometimes happen. For example, in the 2024 election, Trump was trading at probabilities below 50%, but he still won! However, this is conflating present information about the future with future results. Given the earlier example about the biased 55% coin -- before we flip the coin, the best thing we can possibly say about the future really just is that there's a 55% chance of heads and 45% chance of tails. If we then flip the coin and it lands on tails, that doesn't mean we were incorrect -- it was just the best statement about the future that we could have possibly made.
Prediction markets -- or really any price system -- aggregate the best available information about the future. If you can confidently state that they are wrong -- that their best available information about the future is inaccurate -- then you should be trading and making money.
Does that clear things up a bit for you? It's a longer response, but I think it might address some of the confusion that you (or anyone else) might have regarding what people actually mean when they say that these prices predict the future.
> Instead, they felt compelled to make a trivially false claim, the claim that prediction markets do not accurately predict the future. It's trivial to prove that this claim is false, because if it were true, it would be very easy for anyone to make a huge amount of money on prediction markets.
Isn’t that what’s actually happening though? Traders are making real money from bad predictions?
“These are the Sharps actually making money on prediction markets” Odd Lots podcast (Bloomberg) 2026 https://youtu.be/MFAnQpdgkZE
Christ, just say you are conservative and don't like unions and their political stances. 'Accuracy' doesn't matter at all when it comes to assessing harm, but the existence of a market signal itself can change outcomes, and then much vaunted 'accuracy' becomes a mechanism for fraud in a new and different way.
Even taking your nitpick a little bit seriously, behold:
> Retail prediction market traders pick winners 51.3% of the time yet lose money; automated traders achieve coin-flip accuracy yet earn $133 million.
The entire enterprise exists to move money from gamblers to companies. The externalities (suicide, social degradation) of this transaction is bourne by society.
In practical terms commercial prediction markets are unregulated gambling. That's where the money comes from. Stapling a vitamin C packet to your cigarette box doesn't diminish that you're selling cigarettes.
Again, this union doesn't seem to take a position on gambling at all in this statement
And that's the problem with current journalism. They use terms like "facts" and "proven" way too loosely. Everything is way too biased.
Politics is the act of organizing people.
Your whole comment misses the point of the sport. It is not effective to look for the most accurate or rhetorically tested point, the goal is to rally as large a group around a point that dosent make them look like hypocrites, or materially clashes with how they present their identity in other parts of their lives.
This point being mealy mouthed is by design.