When I was born in the 1970s, legal gambling was basically limited to Las Vegas, Atlantic City and horse racing.Then came Indian casinos, and finally, the floodgates opened with online gambling.
Nowadays, with the advent of prediction markets, we can lay down a marker on almost any event on Earth.One serious upshot of the rise of companies like Kalshi and Polymarket, which would be happy to set up a market to see if Lindy’s sells more cheesecake or strudel today, is that far, far more people have the feedbox noise than ever before.To paraphrase Andy Warhol, in the future, everyone will have inside information on a prediction market for 15 minutes.Take a market like "Who will win the reality TV show "Big Brother?" Dozens, maybe even hundreds of people know this answer, thousands probably have inside info, and while, if they say anything out loud they will get sued into oblivion, what's to stop them from telling their cousin, "Hey, drop a few thousand on this contestant?"Kalshi is a federally regulated U.S.-based prediction market exchange that allows users to trade on the outcomes of political, economic and other real-world events.
(Laura Brett/Getty Images)GREED MEETS GREED: DRAFTKINGS TO CLOSE ITS WRIGLEY FIELD SPORTSBOOK AT THE END OF MAY OVER ILLINOIS TAXThis isn’t a hypothetical anymore.We have seen, just this year, a soldier use inside information to win a bet on the timing of military action in Venezuela, we have even had the guy who runs the White House teleprompter profit from foreknowledge of President Donald Trump’s speeches.These are not the types of people we think of as insider traders.When we think of insider trading we think of wood-paneled financial offices with Paul Revere silver sets and guys in $5,000 suits.
I also think of members of Congress who go to Washington worth thousands and leave worth tens of millions, but that's another story.DOZENS OF HOUSE DEMOCRATS REJECT BILL FUSING CONGRESSIONAL STOCK BAN WITH FEDERAL VOTER IDAs in sports...