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Nobel Peace Prize 2025: María Corina Machado

(www.nobelprize.org)
536 points pykello | 2 comments | 10 Oct 25 09:03 UTC | HN request time: 0.417s | source
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haunter ◴[10 Oct 25 09:10 UTC] No.45536742[source]▶
~10 hours or so before the announcement bets on her skyrocketed on Polymarket

https://x.com/polymarket/status/1976434242386317640

Someone without any history whatsoever put 70k on her 5 hours before the announcement

https://x.com/polywhalewatch/status/1976499384373121488

Trump was never above 5-10% and out of nowhere she was the winner (see the 1 day market view) https://polymarket.com/event/nobel-peace-prize-winner-2025?t...

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jychang ◴[10 Oct 25 09:20 UTC] No.45536815[source]▶
This isn't illegal but feels like it should be illegal. You don't see corporate officers trade their stocks right before a big announcement, because there are laws on it.

Other than the fact that polymarket is legally not a stock market, what really is the difference between insider trading on a stock market vs insider trading on polymarket? Does anyone have a good argument for why one should be illegal while the other is legal?

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mnx ◴[10 Oct 25 09:31 UTC] No.45536888[source]▶
The argument goes, the purpose of prediction markets is not to be fair, it's to provide information. Allowing insider trading benefits that purpose. And I think that's fair - this is not a place to invest your retirement savings, it's essentially gambling.
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CaptainOfCoit ◴[10 Oct 25 11:29 UTC] No.45537655[source]▶
I kind of feel like abusing the information asymmetry when doing insider trading in a betting market should be illegal regardless if the purpose is to provide information or not, or if it's considered gambling or not. Just like doing so with stocks is illegal today.
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edanm ◴[10 Oct 25 14:27 UTC] No.45539491[source]▶
Why? This net saves people money, because it makes markets reflect reality faster.

Other than a vague sense of "fairness", can you articulate why insider trading should be illegal?

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Fraterkes ◴[10 Oct 25 15:01 UTC] No.45539856[source]▶
It being unfair might dissuade people from using it, that would kinda compromise the goal of helping markets reflect reality
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1. edanm ◴[10 Oct 25 17:14 UTC] No.45541312[source]▶
But no one is actually hurt by it.

(I'm not saying you're wrong, btw. People aren't always rational.)

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2. jychang ◴[10 Oct 25 22:08 UTC] No.45544377[source]▶
Smart people are financially hurt by it.

Isn't that the entire point of the prediction market model? You derive the wisdom of the crowd by enabling smarter people who make better educated guesses as predictions (from the same access to information as others) to win out over time. They are incentivized to do this financially, by winning bets.

If markets just becomes "first person to cheat takes all", then there's no incentive to NOT cheat. So you drive away the people who power the prediction market in the absence of information. Over time, this means that the prediction market is just random noise until a leaker publishes news. At that point, you might as well as just skip the middleman and just make a website "LeakNews" where you can directly offer bounties that goes towards a reward paid out to a leaker for news you are interested in.