As always, my dude Matt Levine got me onto this story.

Since he, like me #1497608, #1501805, claims that prediction markets are just gambling dressed up in fancy cloths and there's no real economic activity/risk being hedged, he keeps getting fucked by fate. In today's Money Stuff he confesses

"The universe, and Kalshi and Susquehanna, are conspiring to prove me wrong.""The universe, and Kalshi and Susquehanna, are conspiring to prove me wrong."

Because yesterday, he reported on a funny story by Liz Hoffman about a Spanish team facing relegation (and thus economic damage) making a bet against themselves -- SEE, SEE, HEDGING REAL ECONOMIC ACTIVITY!

So they turned to Kalshi, placing a multimillion-dollar bet against itself, in case the game didn’t break its way. In the end, the club squeaked by, losing its final game of the season by a narrow enough margin, 1-0, to keep its place in the top tier of La Liga.

But its prediction-market bet shows how these platforms are beginning to outgrow their YOLO beginnings and could one day underpin big parts of traditional finance. On the other side of the Spanish team’s trade was Susquehanna, according to people familiar with the matter, which says it was the first quant trading firm to establish a dedicated prediction-markets trading desk.

Today he unearths this wonderful football-related story in the WSJ about a guy who works for American Airlines tasked specifically with figuring out which high-profile events are happening where and which additional routes/capacity AA should have available. From, say, Buenos Aires to New York City around July ~18 in case it looks like Argentina is gonna be in the finals.

Sagan has a gig that any sports nut would envy: He basically gets paid to watch games. Here’s the kicker: He’s not a sports nut. The 29-year-old is a network planning analyst for American Airlines, and for the past year his specialty has been special events.

When Bad Bunny or Taylor Swift announce a tour, Sagan jumps into action, setting up American’s flying schedule to help fans get to shows. During single-elimination tournaments, he’s researching teams’ fans and tracking every game to ensure American has the right number of flights within minutes of the final buzzer.

The closest proxy was FIFA’s Club World Cup held across 10 U.S. states last year, which provided a model for how soccer fans might move across North America this summer. Sagan and his team mapped out flight paths for placeholders, based on stadium locations and rough dates.

Capitalism is amazing so of course there's enough value-add for several full-time peeps at airlines just figuring out which routes to have where and with what capacity!

Clearly, American should just place a bunch of hedging bets on Kalshi!

Real economic activity hedged! amagad, incredible.

archive: https://archive.md/AQKkk