How we've all dreamt of this.

(Too bad there isn't enough liquidity/depth/range of bets on Predyx! THO a sharp interviewed by the author says it's precisely those sorts of markets that offer the greatest opportunities...)

I’ve never been much of a gambling man. Growing up in Providence, Rhode Island, I knew a few bookies. Suffice it to say, they were not the sort you ever wanted to owe money to, so I left the gambling to other, braver men

I'm with him... betting seems like a loser's version of DCAing into bitcoin sorry, index funds! Negative-sum game, where your hubris and self-confidence works against you.

For most of my life, of course, gambling was illegal, unless you went to Las Vegas. Even after the rise of FanDuel and DraftKings, I was never tempted. But now, prediction markets have arrived—and somehow, they feel different. They offer betting opportunities that go well beyond sports.

These are some shocking numbers

Since then, prediction markets have only gotten bigger. In April, the two biggest players, Polymarket and Kalshi, processed $24 billion in trading volume—more than 10 times what they did a year earlier, according to the Pew Research Center. Some 40 percent of American men between the ages 18 and 34 are using prediction markets, an April survey found.

Another real-world use (#1509611):

The media companies see the prediction markets not just as lucrative sponsors, but also as a potentially more accurate alternative to polls, which have a checkered track record in recent elections.

Here's a beautiful summary overview paragraph of wth prediction markets are all about

Prediction markets insist that they’re not in the gambling business (though let’s be honest: Most of their customers think that’s exactly what they’re doing). They work more like a stock exchange, matching two parties on either side of a trade. As sentiment changes, so do the odds (again, like a stock), but once you are locked into a price, it’s yours unless you decide to close out your position. It’s akin to buying or selling a futures contract, which is why the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) regulates the prediction markets.

"In the best-case scenario, they could allow for a kind of predictive clarity that goes well beyond election polls or sports oddsmakers. And the worst-case scenario? They could undermine our trust in the integrity of everything from elections to military operations.""In the best-case scenario, they could allow for a kind of predictive clarity that goes well beyond election polls or sports oddsmakers. And the worst-case scenario? They could undermine our trust in the integrity of everything from elections to military operations."

For a week, I would leave behind my day job at The Free Press and, with $1,000 at my disposal, become a prediction market day trader. I had lots of questions, not the least of which was: What effect would making prediction market bets have on me?
Despite the best efforts of all involved, it turned out to be impossible to transfer corporate funds from The Free Press to Kalshi, so I wound up depositing my own $1,000 in my new Kalshi account. Maybe it’s better that way—I have money at stake. On the other hand, I’m also feeling a lot more stress than if I were playing with the company’s cash.

sick shout-out:

I made one important phone call before I started. Robin Hanson is a 66-year-old associate professor of economics at George Mason University and is widely credited with being the father of prediction markets. When he first began writing about the idea in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he wasn’t anticipating that people would be putting money on whether Ariana Grande or Drake would have the No. 1 song on Spotify. Hanson’s vision, he told me, was that prediction markets could help people make better decisions.

Robin Hanson is the coolest

But that is a far cry from the prediction markets that exist in the here and now. I asked Hanson if it bothered him that they had strayed so far from his original concept. Not really, he said, because as prediction markets grow, “They will create more users, more familiarity, and better interfaces that, in the long run, will make the things I want to do come about.”

I'm suspecting Undisc is just secretly Mr. Hanson.

FINALLY an explanation for why sports is everywhere... it's cheaper (and less asymmetric info!) than the competition:

According to Kalshi, 64 percent of the trading volume on the site is sports. Gamblers love sports prediction markets because they have lower fees than oddsmakers like FanDuel, and they’re not betting against the house, but rather against a peer.

So Nocera goes through day by day the bets he made... mostly, unfortunately sports. Also, kind of odd to do this on such a short timeline... NOT that many interesting bet (where you might have some edge) coming to fruition within a week?

SHARPS, writes Nocera, aren't making insane amounts of money because they're smart and do research...

It’s also because of people like me, for whom betting on prediction markets will never be our primary occupation. We’re dabblers, amateurs. According to the Times, the sharps call us “squares,” “fish,” “retards,” and “total idiots.” It’s like the old saying about poker: If you look around the table and don’t know who the sucker is, it’s you.

uh-uh, insider trading!

tldr, basically outsourced journalism:

"Prediction markets are getting useful,” writes Liz Hoffman, the business and finance editor for Semafor, the online news site. In the past, Hoffman has described prediction markets as “demented casinos running on vibes.” But she has also championed their potential as a hedging device. In an earlier column, she wondered why ski resorts didn’t hedge the weather, something they could easily do on Kalshi.

"Why in the world did I ever bet on the number of gonorrhea cases in the U.S. this year? Sheesh.""Why in the world did I ever bet on the number of gonorrhea cases in the U.S. this year? Sheesh."

For two weeks, I spent way too much of each day contemplating the myriad betting possibilities Kalshi offered. It was exhausting. It was also impoverishing—and I don’t mean financially. Once you go down the Kalshi rabbit hole, you obsess over the odds and lose sight of the stakes. [...] The folks at Kalshi were friendly and helpful as I worked on this story, but in the end, I wound up thinking that their product isn’t helping anyone.