Of course he should be punished but the best lesson here is for bettors. Those who wager on "prediction markets": you are betting against people who have access to more information or can influence the outcome of the wager. Don't waste your money.
That's sort of the point of prediction markets: they surface insider information by allowing people to profit off of it. The benefit is to people watching the prices, who can then use that information to make better decisions ahead of the answer being revealed to the public. It's not necessarily to market participants, who need to be aware of who else is trading the market and have a credible reason to believe they have better information.
The unfortunate thing is that, while their academic position sounds plausible on paper, just like with most crypto things it's just a money grab.
How many crypto people (with legitimate backgrounds just like the founders of Polymarket and Kalshi) stood up and said big things about freedom and the unbanked etc., turns out they were literally just scamming people- there are so many examples besides FTX.
Letting people bet on any random thing is not at all related to this "price everything" theory. If that was their real goal they wouldn't behave so much like a normal sports betting company. I have yet to actually hear anyone defend their actual actions in a plausible way.
Did you ever consider that the crypto scammers might not be the same people as the crypto freedom folks? It wasn't one grand trick by a collective of genius con artists... Much like the cashier at the store isn't to blame for that guy calling your grandma and trying to trick her into sending money from her bank account.
Crypto is a speculative investment vehicle, its basically a lottery machine - why would people who are so invested in a lottery machine that you can avoid taxes or buy drugs with be surprised they are considered part of the con artists doing the pump and dumps?
When institutional investors and yolo 'get rich' people sell their coins it will drop to (in case of Bitcoin) 2,000 USD again, it would be closer to a currency then. However people would go crazy, because it's only very, very rarely used as a currency. Most just use it as a speculative asset.
I think it's clear that crypto has real market-based utility as an exchange of value. It's just that much of that utility is illegal, for a spectrum of meanings of that word. Paying crypto to murder people is not the same as wanting to get out from under your shitty government's currency into another more stable one.
The whole Epstein thing (the money, I mean) just shows that money has always wanted to be moved around, and a certain class of people don't care how it gets done- I mean the arms dealers, but also the billionaires hiding money in their charities. A libertarian would say that crypto democratizes that for everyone. I don't think it can last forever though.
Don't forget about regimes like Iran and North Korea using crypto to receive bribes, ransomware payments, and launder money. Crypto is a cesspool. Just wait for the bank runs when everyone tries to bail out. There's a reason we have banking regulations.
It barely makes sense, though? The idea is that it will surface insider information to the public. That happens only because the insider is financially incentivized to place a bet. But they will only bet if they can win money, and they can only win money if someone is taking the other side of their bet, which necessarily means someone without their insider information.
In other words, prediction markets require suckers to lose money to insiders in order for the public to learn new information. In this case, people lost over a million dollars to an insider so the public could learn that "d4vd" was searched a lot.
People with insider information often aren't necessarily aware they even have it. "Superforecasters" are often just "good at predicting" moves within a given vertical, because they have expertise and exposure to the trends of that vertical, and are good at making deductions and extrapolating trends. Those people make money from prediction markets just as often as people with true insider info do.
And the people they're both making money from, are people who think they have enough expertise + exposure to function as superforecasters — and who probably could function as superforecasters, in a market with fewer "sharks" in the pool — but who lose out simply because they were slightly less well-calibrated than whoever they were trading with.
Which is to say: prediction markets can still work and be worthwhile to participate in, even if everyone in them is rational. They don't require suckers.
But, in practice, they certainly do seem to attract them.
I think some may be using the terms "insider" and "shark" in different ways. To me:
* Insider: A person who is cheating because they actually know the answer in advance or have direct, non-public, confidential information which materially improves their odds over even domain experts. If caught, they can go to jail. Insider as in "insider trading" not just an "industry insider".
* Superforecaster: A person who has deep domain expertise and/or experience as well as strong research and estimation skills which increase their odds over a naive bettor. This may include historical data or first-hand investigation which is not commonly or easily available to others but has not been obtained illegally.
* Sucker: A person who bets despite having far less than a superforecaster's expertise, experience or knowledge. Probably over-estimates their knowledge while underestimating the degree of relevant knowledge which may be legally obtainable by others.
* Shark: Not really clear to me other than more skilled/knowledgeable than a sucker.
> And the people they're both making money from, are people who think they have enough expertise + exposure to function as superforecasters — and who probably could function as superforecasters, in a market with fewer "sharks" in the pool — but who lose out simply because they were slightly less well-calibrated than whoever they were trading with.
This seems like a complicated way to say "suckers". Of course they don't usually self-identify as such and think they act rationally.
They're not suckers; they can win, if there's nobody who happens to be more-well-calibrated than them on a particular bet. And that can happen more-often-than not, depending on how carefully they bet.
By the conventional use of the term, a "sucker" is always a sucker; suckers suck constitutionally.
But a professional gambler in a skill-based game (e.g. poker), is only going to lose money on net, if they happen to be playing against people with "higher ELO" than them.
And in the case of a prediction market, the "ELO" isn't absolute; people's expertise "rankings" are relative to each particular question. There's no "general factor of expertise" that makes someone able to beat the odds on every question. Each question forms its own market "niche", where only people with expertise will be interested in participating; and so each such niche is to some degree illiquid, with not enough trades to make an efficient market (i.e. the kind you wouldn't expect to find a $20 bill on the ground in.)
To be more concrete: while there are "specialists" (insiders, but also ordinary experts in hyper-specialized verticals) who might clean up by betting on the things they know a lot about, they'll generally be miscalibrated as overconfident on the things outside their specialty (see: any scientist who got famous for their research and now writes pop-science books about topics they know very little about, often making incorrect statements), and so will lose out vs "generalists" who can't successfully make the in-domain bets the specialists make, but who are better-calibrated on multiple topics (or on particular odd intersections of topics) because they spend less time hyperfocused on one niche, and more time flitting between various niches.
Which is to say: there's no "house edge" here to lose against. In a prediction market, everyone's going to be the "shark" for some questions and the "sucker" for other questions. Every question is its own game, and every game has an edge, but with that edge going to a different party. If you actually know what you know, then you can identify which questions you have the edge for (probably a finite number), answer only those, and make some (very small) amount of money. You may lose sometimes because someone knew even better than you (esp. for questions that go beyond yes-or-no, where there are 3+ mutually-exclusive prediction-categories you can buy into, such that others might "hit the bullseye" while you just "hit the ring"); but on average, if you stick to your "field of pre-eminent expertise" (presuming you have such), you would make a small positive gain over time.
That being said, anyone without a "field of pre-eminent expertise", who thinks they can place correct bets purely by being rational + doing the level of research one can accomplish using public Internet sources, is 100% a sucker, yes.
The other side could be someone with natural exposure to the question that wants to hedge, for example people traveling to/from the middle east were exposed to the Iran war question(s) and could get insurance against airspace closure through prediction markets.
This argument doesn't work for 90+% of the volume on PM/Kalshi but I think most of the questions there are just gambling.
Disclaimer: I have not read any literature on the economics of prediction markets, and I know nothing about the mechanics of Polymarket/Kalshi.
I would imagine that in theory, everyone thinks they have the best information at the time, something like:
House: "Odds that X happens? We'll put $1 on both sides to get it started. 50/50."
Someone comes along: "Oh dang, I'm definitely more than 50% confident that X is happening. Let me put $1 in." Now it's 67:33.
Someone else comes along: "Oh I'm more than 67% confident X is happening, let me put $1 in." Now it's 75:25.
And of course, you get people going: "I'm more than 25% confident that X is _not_ happening, let me put $1 in!" And now it's 60:40.
The murky part, I would imagine, comes when the odds and the payout actually act as something that influences the outcome, but in perfect theory-land, if everything goes as planned, this should move the odds to the most informationally-accurate measurement, which should, in theory, benefit observers by making this measurement public.
Sure but these things are not really "odds" anymore, right? The most searched terms might be a mystery to the general public, but not to the engineers at Google. It gets even murkier when you can influence the outcome. The exact temperature at an airport might be difficult to predict, but if you are able to hold up a hair drier to the sensor for a few minutes you can be pretty sure it won't be cold.
When the other side either has information that makes it not a bet, or if they have means to influence the odds, the best outcome for outsiders is to not play at all.
And of course, the entire conceit relies on the idea that more accurate information to the public is always good and always outweighs the negative externalities. But is it really all that important to the public good what the most searched artist is on Google in a certain year? Or if an announcer will say a certain word during the super bowl?
I don't think this is entirely true. Polymarket is extremely transparent on user accounts and markets so you can see who is betting what, their other bets, and so on. The article mentions that other users fingered him for insider trading. That itself opens up an opportunity for profit, by simply following the trades on what he seems to be an insider on. It'd be like if you could see in real time what Nancy Pelosi was investing it - shadow her trades and make big bucks with the soon to be announced market shifting government deal/regulation/etc.
The markets also open up the door for hedging, arbitration and other sorts of opportunities where you don't necessarily even care what the result is.
Right, and that is not some grand secret. Every person taking a side on the bet is aware of that nuance for any trivially gamed market. If you think the size of the market is sufficient to incentivize somebody to do so then that would obviously increase the yes odds.
It's akin to betting on penny stocks in the market where you are also aware that a single person could dramatically shift the market one way or the other if they wanted so you're betting not just on the stock's performance, but also on the meta-market.
The public didn’t even learn the most searched term from the market. The public had a better idea it might be “d4vd” from the market, but only slightly before they learned it for real from Google.
What I can’t figure out is why this person is being charged but the companies running the bets are not.
Imagine bad (incorrect and potentially harmful) information is public knowledge. Examples are "X cures cancer" or "Is Y dangerous to consume".
A prediction market will be seeded by public knowledge (of course it cures cancer or its safe to consume), which you describe "suckers". History is filled with many examples of bad public knowledge that turned out to be false (e.g. DDT is safe pesticide).
An insider (someone who knows the drug trial results, or works at the Corp creating the harmful substance) is incentivized to trade on that knowledge, which creates a better informed public (via people who pay attention to prediction markets).
Why does secret(insider) knowledge exist? To the benefit of the organization that wants to keep the knowledge secret. Insider trading laws purpose is to keep Corp and gov orgs in power. They prevent the dissemination of true information (for private power). Prediction markets incentivize the dissemination of true information, a public good.
That is the beauty of the Resolution part of prediction markets. If evil DDT Corp bets money to skew the market, then they lose even more money on the Resolution (assuming the resolution is deterministic of harm and has not been manipulated).
Oh good, the entire premise of the value of the system rests on an axiom with such giant and obvious flaws that you could drive a supertanker through it.
Does the resolution use the scientific paper that says "DDT is safe" or the one that says "DDT is unsafe"? There's no objective resolution of scientific facts.
"Prediction markets provide better information" in the exact same way that "Markets are efficient". You need to interrogate what "Better information"/"efficient" actually means even if you take the claim at face value, and also it's just not a model that maps to reality well.
it is good if the losers are voluntarily participating. They are not coerced (stupidity is not coercion) into it, and therefore, it is reasonable that they expected to win the bet.
The only problem i have with polymarket (and others like it) are that insiders can often remain anonymous. It should not, and if an insider earns, but their win requires they remain anonymous or face some social/reputational repercussions, then that should happen.
Therefore, as long as KYC is enforced for these markets, i would have zero issues with their existence.
In most modern societies, we regulate all sorts of things that people would otherwise willingly do to their own detriment. We ban drugs; we have labor laws; we have usury laws; we require seatbelts; we have securities regulations; etc. (Notably, until very recently, this included most forms of gambling.)
So the mere fact that losers are voluntary does not, IMO, make the situation good.
all of those things you mentioned have damages sustained on third parties that did not have consent. And tbh, my opinion is that the banning of drugs have done more harm than not banning it (but instead, allow it to be sold safely and cheaply).
Gambling to me, is like that. Banning it doesn't stop it, and it has barely any harm other than to the person who over-indulge. Regulating it is a good idea - where regulating means there's oversight on cheating, on the platform's governance etc.
Gambling addiction has impacts beyond the person gambling, because we live in a society. They might gamble away their kid's college fund, lose their house, or resort to stealing money from family members. When they take out loans that they default on, it impacts the balls and raises costs for everyone else.
All of these are very similar to secondary and societal effects of hard drug addiction. It should at the very least be regulated. And most being is worthless from an information standpoint, so isn't providing any societal upside - a man doesn't hurt us. The world was strictly better before we had rampant gambling everywhere.
> all of those things you mentioned have damages sustained on third parties that did not have consent.
The family that suddenly finds themselves homeless because one parent decided to go deep into debt to fuel their gambling addiction sure seems to have "damages sustained on third parties that did not have consent."
That’s the academic theory behind these markets, but there’s no actual value to knowing who the most searched celebrity will be or any of this other garbage. It’s just an unregulated casino with guesses about the popularity of Google searches instead of guessing black or red.
It's not being regulated as a casino (which would limit what the casino could do). It is being regulated, to a limited extent, like a commodity market (which does limit what the participants can do).
I believe Polymarket wants it to fall under the regulations of cftc as it is implemented like an option/event contract. And cftc says that they don't care about which technology is used. But as far as I now this is the first case it will be tested for real and the views of cftc and a judge may not be the same. I fail to see how it can be classified as insider trading. But, it is till fraud so I'm not sure how much it matters in the end.
How is it fraud? Wouldnt it just be a tos violation?
In my view, anyone participating in these markets does so knowing that the outcomes are within the control of other participants. I can't think of any other reason individual account activity is public.
US have wire fraud laws which I believe includes this. But it will be an interesting case to follow. Personally I don't see anything that should be a crime here at all.
It’s not rare nowadays that speculation on some topic will include the Polymarket rates. Google searches: Maybe not. Maybe that’s just gambling for the fun of it.
Sure, but let’s consider the bet the accused took: who is the most searched person in 2025. What benefit is there in knowing this ahead of time? Who is making decisions based on this?
I understand betting on something as a hedge - for example a farmer betting there will be no rain as a way to hedge the failure of his crops.
But nobodies life depends which singer is most searched (apart from maybe the singers themselves trying to have a more stable income). Surely that doesn't equate to millions of dollars though.
As opposed to the publicly available Google Trends data? As opposed to running legitimate market research? Wouldn't you rather know the most searched person in your vertical, market, etc?
The data in this example was going to be made public anyways. All the examples of prediction markets are predicated on them becoming public. You not only need the info, you need the info before it becomes public.
and that's exactly how the Google engineer made money, right? He knew it beforehand, and once it was made public other people did too
Realtime access to internal Google search data may help you predict a lot of things that might be worth money, for example there's an existing market where companies buy usage estimation for competitors products (not though Google). I don't see why so many people are completely sure this information is worthless
> For example, d4vd is a famous musician, and search stats may indicate his potential popularity and future record sales.
I wasn't really aware of that as I guess I am not the target demography. However, I can think of multiple ways of making money off this information, I still don't see why people are so sure it is worthless
So far it seems insiders are mostly incentivized to bet on their insider information at the last possible minute, so that the market doesn't have time to adjust toward their position and lessen their profits. That doesn't leave non-insiders a lot of time to do anything useful with the information, even if it happens to be something that would benefit them to know about.
I think they are open about it. John Oliver did a piece on it last month and I recall an interview where the founder of one of these prediction markets shared this as a beneficial effect of the product.
Couldn’t that same argument be used to justify stock market insider trading? The problem with insiders is not just that they can surface information, but they can actually manipulate the results. It’s why baseball players can’t bet on the results of their games, even if a prediction market guru might argue “their bets surface valuable information” or something.
That’s not the basis of insider trading in US securities law. US securities insider trading is premised on the idea that insiders are stealing from people they have an obligation to (the shareholders).
Cool. So we benefit by prediction markets surfacing insider information about Trump's plans in the Iran conflict, and unknown insiders making hundreds of millions on that information with massive trades minutes before each announcement benefited the people watching prices in the oil market? That doesn't seem right.
Hmm, not following. The insider trade in this case was small enough to not change the lines meaningfully, no? D4vd's chances of being #1 went from <1% to >99% nearly overnight, was a huge upset.
Polymarket might be different, but conventional Vegas-style lines change with the amount of $$ bet, if the pool is $50M and an insider bets $10k on the long shot, the line isn't moving -- I don't see how insider information can be surfaced in this scenario except after the fact (and only maybe then).
In other words, if the line changes enough to signal insider info, it's not really insider info anymore.
Because these markets aren't all that efficient yet (possibly because other potential market participants are scared off by insider trading charges). You don't have multiple people that all have insider information betting against each other, you have one person with insider information that cleans out everybody else. If this repeats enough, all the people without insider information will get cleaned out and exit the market, all the other people with insider information will enter the market for profit, and prices should converge to true likelihood.
And yes, the whole purpose of prediction markets is to turn insider info into public info.
> And yes, the whole purpose of prediction markets is to turn insider info into public info.
You realize that betting on an event you have insider info on is against their terms and conditions, right? So while it may be your personal goal, it's certainly not Polymarket's or Kalshi's.
But you just said "The benefit is to people watching the prices" -- but if the odds haven't properly converged what information does watching the prices get you before-the-fact?
Maybe I'm just not getting it, could you lay out a scenario?
> if the odds haven't properly converged what information does watching the prices get you before-the-fact?
How do you know we are "before-the fact"? Because these numbers are bananas?
Somebody just tanked their job, their life, for a million bucks.
Anybody who took that bet, might've individually spent only a few bucks to see that.
Everyone else (the people watching) learned the price of entertainment is a few bucks, and ruining someone's life is a million bucks.
Was that a surprise to you? If not, then the (market) prices may be said to have converged (close to) reality.
But maybe it is, and you think people would ruin their lives for less, or would pay more for human misery. In any event, the distance between whatever you think that probability is, and the return earned on these odds is information, that we all can enjoy (as benefit) before-the-fact.
The point is to make money by letting people gamble on the future. What you said is a second order effect of doing the first thing. They should at least be regulated under gambling laws, doesnt make sense without it
What Polymarket says on the topic (https://integrity.polymarket.com/) is that they do not surface insider information and you mustn't trade if you have any.
Because the prediction market community is filled with liars and fraudsters, of course, it does seem to be common knowledge that this restriction isn't meant to be taken seriously, much like Polymarket's fake rule that Americans aren't allowed to use it.
But once you start from the premise that everything prediction markets say about their rules and practices is a lie, why should we believe they provide any genuine signal for anything?
Less than 3% of regular sports bettors are consistently profitable, with an estimated 1% to 2% of players winning the vast majority of all available money. The remaining 97-99% of players—who treat betting as a casual hobby rather than a professional endeavor—end up losing money over time.
If gambling was more profitable for more people it wouldn't be called gambling. Might have some clever name like the NYSE.
Also, at least on Polymarket, beware of those who can influence the settlement of the wager, which may settle not in concordance with the actual outcome in reality.
Yup, same with any kind of betting - sport, even draw games. There are obviously stories that someone managed to "game the system", like a man who figured out how to find winning scratch cards (Mohan Srivastava case) or Željko Ranogajec winning in Keno, but the point is that in the first case it was luck + skills, in the second it was overcoming the TOS by creating a lot of fake accounts, that's why the guy had to give his win back (details of the agreement were not revealed).
You bet against skilled people who set the stakes, so, yes, by observing numbers you can win in Keno, but if you comply to the TOS you will not win big money. The only chance to be able to "game the system" is to bet on something that lotteries brokers does not have time to look at, like 3rd Bulgarian bocce league matches.
The problem is that you need to somehow become an expert in 3rd Bulgarian bocce league and the money which are there are generally small.
I was investigating this (again) when AI showed up, as in theory it makes easier some analysis, but the big guys are also using AI.
Most sports betting markets have a degree of unpredictability, and bookmakers will ban sharps (those falling outside the statistical norm or continually hitting lines just before the market moves).
Betting on a final score in most markets is fine.
When betting gets extremely narrow and specific e.g. "Player X will be subbed on for Player Y" it gets morally dubious.
There is a lot of overlap with insurance markets. The incentives have to be aligned (life insurance) with sensible guard rails against abuse (cooling off periods to be covered for suicide)
That's a very naive take of someone who never professionally traded. There are liquidity providing, market making trading strategies that work in absence of insider information.
I was curious how a man in Switzerland gets charged in the US for a placing bets on a site that doesn't allow the US to participate.
The short answer seems to be that he stole private information from a US company and used that information to enrich himself. And then got that charge enhanced with things like wire fraud and transacting on systems involving US currency.
And another commentor suggests that punishing insider traders in a step towards legitimzing and regulating prediction markets in the US.
You can charge anyone in the world with anything, the trouble is getting a judge to agree with you and getting your hands on the person you're charging.
The first problem doesn't seem to be all that hard in the US (unless the inside traders are part of the US government, of course), the second problem can be as simple as having Google organise an all-expenses-paid team activity to bait the subject into jurisdiction.
If the basis for their charges really is just that he traded in dollars, then this is yet another example why nobody should trust Americans and their currency when it comes to trade. I hope they can come up with something better than that.
> the second problem can be as simple as having Google organise an all-expenses-paid team activity to bait the subject into jurisdiction.
This actually happens. I know that the FBI once organized an all-expenses-paid trip to a "conference in Hawaii" for certain Chinese chemists it wanted to nab.
The corollary is that if you have reason to expect you're wanted by American Feds, never travel outside China, Russia, and certain European states that are extraordinarily hesitant to extradite to the US (e.g. Ireland).
I thought I'd heard of this but couldn't find enough examples of this, let alone an FBI induced landing.
It appears REALLY hard to step over jurisdictions.
I did find the PLO terrorist incident from 1985. The terrorists killed an American on a cruiseship, Achille Lauro. Reagan sent a fighter jet to intercept, escort, and force a landing in Italy for the commercial jet the terrorists were later flying on.
There are other examples like forcing downed flights in the hunt for Snowden, but it's super rare and ultimately unlikely.
The interesting part is that he got charged with insider trading. A few attorneys on bluesky have pointed out that this is a novel use of this law since previously the trading occurred on regulated markets (e.g. SEC or CFTC regulated markets like stock markets and commodities/futures exchanges).
They are regulated. That's why Connecticut, Arizona, and Illinois are being sued by the government. They tried to regulate these markets and the CFTC says they regulate them, not the states.
The argument goes that because Polymarket (.com) doesn't effectively block US users, it is in practice operating in the US even though it claims not to be. Similar to how the EU claims jurisdiction over foreign sites that process EU citizen data for GDPR.
Transacting on systems involving a currency (USDC) that is pegged to a US currency.
Pretty sure he sold Swiss Francs for USDC and deposited those onto Polymarket (after running them through mixers -- hence the money laundering charges).
So, after doing some light Googling and AI research, this doesn’t seem to be strictly an “insider trading” charge from the SEC.
It looks more like a broader fraud case. The charges are commodities fraud / Commodity Exchange Act violation, wire fraud, and money laundering, and the case is being brought by the DOJ.
So, lawyers, please correct me if I’m wrong, but this feels more like prosecutors found a legal framework to charge him for conduct that resembles insider trading. By contrast, if he had sold Google stock based on insider knowledge, that would have more directly implicated SEC insider trading rules.
So, functionally, it feels like an insider trading case, but technically, it isn’t one.
My understanding - "insider trading" is specifically for securities, and brought by the SEC. The equivalent for commodities is called "market manipulation", brought by the CFTC. Market manipulation is a much harder thing to prove than insider trading.
This kind of reminds me of the OpenSea "insider trading" scandal. [0]
Yeah I’m not entirely sure how what he did was illegal. I hope he can afford good attorneys. Hard to see this as anything other than a way to take the heat off the White House for using insider information to profit on prop betting sites.
The charges are a bit funny. [1] "From at least in or about October 2025 up to and including at least in or about December 2025, in the Southern District of New York and elsewhere outside of the jurisdiction of any particular State or district of the United States".
Um yes, everywhere is either inside of or outside of the jurisdiction of SDNY. But argueable, if you're charging somebody it only matters if it's _inside of_.
I think your reading of SDNY jurisdiction is a misreading. The SDNY is the venue for where the DOJ is charging them, which is fairly common for financial crime cases.
Right. I was very surprised because there aren't laws against insider trading on prediction markets.
So I genuinely don't understand what he is being charged with. What precisely is the "fraud"? The entire point of prediction markets is to get people with better information to participate, i.e. "insiders".
Insider trading with public corporations has tons of specific laws around it to clearly define what is insider information and what isn't. Prediction markets don't have any of that.
And the article does nothing whatsoever to clarify what the heck the actual fraud is supposed to be.
(And I understand this is against Google policy, but that's not what this is about.)
Why are we wasting government money cracking down on Polymarket betting? The most offensive thing in this article is the government pretending Polymarket bets are securities. Prediction markets provide no benefit to society and don't need to exist.
> government pretending Polymarket bets are securities
Crypto prediction markets have an interest in being regulated like traditional exchanges since it opens up access to Wall Street market makers for increased liquidity.
No, as the name sort of suggests, it's a stock market. As in, it's a place for people to buy stakes in companies, and occasionally a place for companies to raise money by selling stakes in themselves.
I think that the person misused Google internal information and deserves termination or other discipline, but I’m struggling to otherwise see the harm in what they did. Is insider trading a crime on prediction markets? Doesn’t it contribute to the accuracy of the pricing of prediction contracts, and therefore is good for the prediction market?
But also I don't think the T&C's came into play here. This is strictly his employer (Google) told him to keep this information confidential and he didn't and instead profited from it.
I’m completely failing to get outraged here.
I think that the person that a/b/c deserves prison or other discipline, but I’m struggling to otherwise see the harm in what they did. Is insider trading a crime on prediction markets? Doesn’t it contribute to the accuracy of the pricing of prediction contracts, and therefore is good for the prediction market?
a. started fires in California
b. lobbied the president to attack Iran
c. neglected critical aid spreading Ebola
By the way there are reasons why we ban sport people from betting or insiders to disclose their (and relatives) trades to the sec: incentives.
It seems like the prediction market crowd cannot understand the economics of incentives and their harmful consequences.
Even though we already see the harm in the real world with journalists receiving death threats for reporting news or randoms tampering with meteorological equipment to win bets.
> He did not enter a plea and was released on a $2.25 million bond
I'm not familiar with the US system of bond. Is this payment a kind of fine that you don't get back, or a temporary payment? And what does it give you? I mean if prosecuted you get prison anyway, right?
it's a temporary payment that gets returned when certain obligations are met (often at the end of trial when you're either free to go or going to prison). Bail also often comes with conditions like an ankle monitor, drug/alcohol testing, staying within a certain state... etc. Part of the idea is that you want that money back so you'll be on your best behavior and comply.
Tangentially, it's really important to be out on bail while your court case progresses. Access to lawyers, income, friends, support, research, etc is a critical factor in preparing your defense.
In the US, unless you have that much cash lying around, you have to borrow the money from a bail bondsman. They typically charge 10% for loaning you the money, and they're out the dough if you skip bail.
It’s temporary, yes. Basically just collateral to promise you’ll show up for the court hearings.
Often they’re paid through bondsman who finance bonds (you pay them a fee). Which also results in a bounty hunting industry for the people that do run away.
Also of note, if you can’t pay the fee or give the bondsman some collateral for his service, your court date may be many months or even years in the future and the date can be postponed many times along the way. So you will be in jail that whole time. If you’re given a prison sentence, time served is usually applied towards it. If you’re found innocent or otherwise not given a prison sentence, your life was just ruined. It’s kind of a bad deal but mostly hurts the poor so nobody cares to fix it.
Innocent until proven guilty is kind of a lie. The US has so many edge cases like this where our US Constitutional rights have been severely neutered.
There is some differences between bail and bond, but basically the same thing. Is a payment that lets you out of prison until trial under conditions. If you break conditions, payment is forfeited, but returned otherwise
This is because time to trial/actual trial itself can take a long time and there is generally dislike of keeping a person in confinement on the chance they are innocent.
Anderson Cooper: But predictive markets do rely on someone having some inside information.
Shayne Coplan: Uh-huh. Yeah. I think that people going and having an edge to the market is a good thing. Obviously, you need to curate them and you need to be really clear and stringent on where the line is drawn and, like, sort of ethics and we spend a lot of time on that. But it's sort of an inevitability that this will happen, and there's a lot of benefits from it. And, you know, people will adapt.
> If you worked at Google for 12 years, it seems pretty irrational to commit this kind of crime for only $1M.
Person who has been working in a single FAANG for decade+ without job-hopping could have had quite minor refreshers during their tenure, so you shouldn't automatically assume they are rich.
I think the point the grandparent comment is trying to make is that at a staff level, and having been at google for 12 years, he was likely being paid pretty well, and that he could've made that same money longer term just by continuing to work at google
Interesting the federal government can't seem to find the resources to investigate their own internal insider trading related to war and foreign policy.
So now the real bet he lost is salary + time for all those years he is going to prision + lower job for decades after prison. This person bet Millions to get $1M basically and lost both, very rare gambling level lost from smart(used to) person. At least normal gambler loses what they have and some debt.
He was Staff-level as well. That's minimum $500k a year or more. And tenure often grows pay disproportionately at Google. That's easily $20 million lost.
It's possible he had multiple accounts but seems unlikely, one reason he was caught was because he made a whole bunch of trades on markets related to "year in search", all on one account, and all the trades were perfect. If he was thinking about creating new accounts to obscure himself then he should have at least made each bet he placed on a seperate account.
People (particularly those committing crimes) do frequently overlook things in inconsistent ways, so it's possible. But seems unlikely to me.
What would happen if some regular Joe, completely unrelated to any other user, watched for bets that could signal insider information and made significant profit themselves, too?
That's called "copy trading", which has been around for decades.
If there's no connection between you and the trade you're copying, there's nothing you can be charged with. Normally there's a natural latency between the "signal" trade (i.e. the trade to copy), and the copy trade, which obviously can alter the profitability. This latency can range from sub-seconds if there's some public ledger, to days/weeks/months if the info is due to disclosure. Obviously when it comes to crypto and public ledgers, we're on the former.
But as soon as you place such trades based on insider trading, that's insider trading.
fair number of people do this, bunch of free tools to filter by this criteria (brand new account, more than $xx,xxx size), vulnerable to spoofing obviously
This is where a lot of the crypto scammers on x have moved, selling ai/bots to do this. It seems like the odds slip significantly after these large bets are filled.
This is a trade that is already done by trading businesses. It doesn’t even need to be this explicit; you could for instance dispose one side of a trade to reduce exposure to insiders.
Prohibition just drives vices into a black market. In this case, probably just with VPNs to offshore betting markets where users would have less legal recourse. Nobody ever regulated insider trading in gambling _until_ the CFTC started authorising predictions markets.
If they recognize they are betting companies, they have no right to operate in the majority of the states. So, they found the CFTC willing to pretend that these betting contracts are in fact securities, and that is how they can legally operate.
prediction markets have become like the "modern" version of crypto "get rich quick" mania of the nft era.
grifters gonna grift where they see an opportunity. also got the money printer turned on for some while the others resort to "chance" (fair or otherwise) to get paid.
Wait what? What "bets"? Bets can happen only on the gambling sites, and Polymarket is definitely not one of those, right? Poly is a prediction market, rewarding the person with the best prediction. How can there be "insider trading" on a site rewarding best information? The USA corporate and regulatory hypocrisy is off the charts :)
Like it’s nice to see someone get charged for using insider knowledge to win at prediction markets, but are we seriously just going to say this is the first big case and not any of the suspiciously accurate accounts created immediately before Iran War events?
I fucking hate this double standard hypocrisy. Leading by example means if your political or corporate leaders can game the system then so can you, I say.
Polymarket US is only able to operate in the USA because it is being regulated by the CFTC as a securities market. Otherwise, they would have been seen as a gambling site and would have been banned virtually everywhere.
Trump's family and their cronies have a free pardon waiting for them the day they get convicted. Better wait until the next regime shift, spending money on trying to prosecute the insiders now is just a waste of everyone's time and money. So far Trump has pardoned the 1/6 insurrectionists without any consequences, pardoning someone for a little white collar crime is barely going to hit the news cycle.
Wow. WTF does this say about Google algorithmic manipulation if an employee can predict specific search results to such a granular extent... Down to a specific artist. Google is rigged.
> if an employee can predict specific search results to such a granular extent
It's not a prediction, it's a query in a tool/database that's supposed to hold counts.
There's no rigging here - it's just a summary of historical data being accessed and used before being public, in violation of confidentiality agreements. If he had just sourced the data without acting on it, the system would have still logged somewhere, but likely nobody would have looked at it. My understanding is that the last couple weeks before being released won't dramatically change counts unless an extraordinary event happens that drowns the last 11 months of data.
Of course he should be punished but the best lesson here is for bettors. Those who wager on "prediction markets": you are betting against people who have access to more information or can influence the outcome of the wager. Don't waste your money.
That's sort of the point of prediction markets: they surface insider information by allowing people to profit off of it. The benefit is to people watching the prices, who can then use that information to make better decisions ahead of the answer being revealed to the public. It's not necessarily to market participants, who need to be aware of who else is trading the market and have a credible reason to believe they have better information.
The unfortunate thing is that, while their academic position sounds plausible on paper, just like with most crypto things it's just a money grab.
How many crypto people (with legitimate backgrounds just like the founders of Polymarket and Kalshi) stood up and said big things about freedom and the unbanked etc., turns out they were literally just scamming people- there are so many examples besides FTX.
Letting people bet on any random thing is not at all related to this "price everything" theory. If that was their real goal they wouldn't behave so much like a normal sports betting company. I have yet to actually hear anyone defend their actual actions in a plausible way.
Did you ever consider that the crypto scammers might not be the same people as the crypto freedom folks? It wasn't one grand trick by a collective of genius con artists... Much like the cashier at the store isn't to blame for that guy calling your grandma and trying to trick her into sending money from her bank account.
The real problem is that when it matters there's no way to tell them apart.
Because one wants to look like the other for very obvious reasons.
Crypto is a speculative investment vehicle, its basically a lottery machine - why would people who are so invested in a lottery machine that you can avoid taxes or buy drugs with be surprised they are considered part of the con artists doing the pump and dumps?
Crypto is... a currency?
The people yoloing into crypto in the hopes it will go up are not the same people advocating for a global currency revolution.
And why exactly are we "hoping for a global currency revolution" - hint, its all the bad stuff that's hard to do with current currency regulations.
When institutional investors and yolo 'get rich' people sell their coins it will drop to (in case of Bitcoin) 2,000 USD again, it would be closer to a currency then. However people would go crazy, because it's only very, very rarely used as a currency. Most just use it as a speculative asset.
With all due respect, so is cash
I think it's clear that crypto has real market-based utility as an exchange of value. It's just that much of that utility is illegal, for a spectrum of meanings of that word. Paying crypto to murder people is not the same as wanting to get out from under your shitty government's currency into another more stable one.
The whole Epstein thing (the money, I mean) just shows that money has always wanted to be moved around, and a certain class of people don't care how it gets done- I mean the arms dealers, but also the billionaires hiding money in their charities. A libertarian would say that crypto democratizes that for everyone. I don't think it can last forever though.
Don't forget about regimes like Iran and North Korea using crypto to receive bribes, ransomware payments, and launder money. Crypto is a cesspool. Just wait for the bank runs when everyone tries to bail out. There's a reason we have banking regulations.
Don't forget about regimes like the USA a using crypto to receive bribes, ransomware payments, and launder money. Crypto is a cesspool.
Sadly, it's not limited to "evil dictatorships" on the other side of the world.
> Crypto is a cesspool.
Wait until you hear about the US Dollar.
If you don't want to address any points, kindly take your whataboutism and go back to reddit.
It barely makes sense, though? The idea is that it will surface insider information to the public. That happens only because the insider is financially incentivized to place a bet. But they will only bet if they can win money, and they can only win money if someone is taking the other side of their bet, which necessarily means someone without their insider information.
In other words, prediction markets require suckers to lose money to insiders in order for the public to learn new information. In this case, people lost over a million dollars to an insider so the public could learn that "d4vd" was searched a lot.
Is this good?
People with insider information often aren't necessarily aware they even have it. "Superforecasters" are often just "good at predicting" moves within a given vertical, because they have expertise and exposure to the trends of that vertical, and are good at making deductions and extrapolating trends. Those people make money from prediction markets just as often as people with true insider info do.
And the people they're both making money from, are people who think they have enough expertise + exposure to function as superforecasters — and who probably could function as superforecasters, in a market with fewer "sharks" in the pool — but who lose out simply because they were slightly less well-calibrated than whoever they were trading with.
Which is to say: prediction markets can still work and be worthwhile to participate in, even if everyone in them is rational. They don't require suckers.
But, in practice, they certainly do seem to attract them.
I think some may be using the terms "insider" and "shark" in different ways. To me:
* Insider: A person who is cheating because they actually know the answer in advance or have direct, non-public, confidential information which materially improves their odds over even domain experts. If caught, they can go to jail. Insider as in "insider trading" not just an "industry insider".
* Superforecaster: A person who has deep domain expertise and/or experience as well as strong research and estimation skills which increase their odds over a naive bettor. This may include historical data or first-hand investigation which is not commonly or easily available to others but has not been obtained illegally.
* Sucker: A person who bets despite having far less than a superforecaster's expertise, experience or knowledge. Probably over-estimates their knowledge while underestimating the degree of relevant knowledge which may be legally obtainable by others.
* Shark: Not really clear to me other than more skilled/knowledgeable than a sucker.
> And the people they're both making money from, are people who think they have enough expertise + exposure to function as superforecasters — and who probably could function as superforecasters, in a market with fewer "sharks" in the pool — but who lose out simply because they were slightly less well-calibrated than whoever they were trading with.
This seems like a complicated way to say "suckers". Of course they don't usually self-identify as such and think they act rationally.
They're not suckers; they can win, if there's nobody who happens to be more-well-calibrated than them on a particular bet. And that can happen more-often-than not, depending on how carefully they bet.
By the conventional use of the term, a "sucker" is always a sucker; suckers suck constitutionally.
But a professional gambler in a skill-based game (e.g. poker), is only going to lose money on net, if they happen to be playing against people with "higher ELO" than them.
And in the case of a prediction market, the "ELO" isn't absolute; people's expertise "rankings" are relative to each particular question. There's no "general factor of expertise" that makes someone able to beat the odds on every question. Each question forms its own market "niche", where only people with expertise will be interested in participating; and so each such niche is to some degree illiquid, with not enough trades to make an efficient market (i.e. the kind you wouldn't expect to find a $20 bill on the ground in.)
To be more concrete: while there are "specialists" (insiders, but also ordinary experts in hyper-specialized verticals) who might clean up by betting on the things they know a lot about, they'll generally be miscalibrated as overconfident on the things outside their specialty (see: any scientist who got famous for their research and now writes pop-science books about topics they know very little about, often making incorrect statements), and so will lose out vs "generalists" who can't successfully make the in-domain bets the specialists make, but who are better-calibrated on multiple topics (or on particular odd intersections of topics) because they spend less time hyperfocused on one niche, and more time flitting between various niches.
Which is to say: there's no "house edge" here to lose against. In a prediction market, everyone's going to be the "shark" for some questions and the "sucker" for other questions. Every question is its own game, and every game has an edge, but with that edge going to a different party. If you actually know what you know, then you can identify which questions you have the edge for (probably a finite number), answer only those, and make some (very small) amount of money. You may lose sometimes because someone knew even better than you (esp. for questions that go beyond yes-or-no, where there are 3+ mutually-exclusive prediction-categories you can buy into, such that others might "hit the bullseye" while you just "hit the ring"); but on average, if you stick to your "field of pre-eminent expertise" (presuming you have such), you would make a small positive gain over time.
That being said, anyone without a "field of pre-eminent expertise", who thinks they can place correct bets purely by being rational + doing the level of research one can accomplish using public Internet sources, is 100% a sucker, yes.
The other side could be someone with natural exposure to the question that wants to hedge, for example people traveling to/from the middle east were exposed to the Iran war question(s) and could get insurance against airspace closure through prediction markets.
This argument doesn't work for 90+% of the volume on PM/Kalshi but I think most of the questions there are just gambling.
Disclaimer: I have not read any literature on the economics of prediction markets, and I know nothing about the mechanics of Polymarket/Kalshi.
I would imagine that in theory, everyone thinks they have the best information at the time, something like:
House: "Odds that X happens? We'll put $1 on both sides to get it started. 50/50."
Someone comes along: "Oh dang, I'm definitely more than 50% confident that X is happening. Let me put $1 in." Now it's 67:33.
Someone else comes along: "Oh I'm more than 67% confident X is happening, let me put $1 in." Now it's 75:25.
And of course, you get people going: "I'm more than 25% confident that X is _not_ happening, let me put $1 in!" And now it's 60:40.
The murky part, I would imagine, comes when the odds and the payout actually act as something that influences the outcome, but in perfect theory-land, if everything goes as planned, this should move the odds to the most informationally-accurate measurement, which should, in theory, benefit observers by making this measurement public.
Sure but these things are not really "odds" anymore, right? The most searched terms might be a mystery to the general public, but not to the engineers at Google. It gets even murkier when you can influence the outcome. The exact temperature at an airport might be difficult to predict, but if you are able to hold up a hair drier to the sensor for a few minutes you can be pretty sure it won't be cold.
When the other side either has information that makes it not a bet, or if they have means to influence the odds, the best outcome for outsiders is to not play at all.
And of course, the entire conceit relies on the idea that more accurate information to the public is always good and always outweighs the negative externalities. But is it really all that important to the public good what the most searched artist is on Google in a certain year? Or if an announcer will say a certain word during the super bowl?
I don't think this is entirely true. Polymarket is extremely transparent on user accounts and markets so you can see who is betting what, their other bets, and so on. The article mentions that other users fingered him for insider trading. That itself opens up an opportunity for profit, by simply following the trades on what he seems to be an insider on. It'd be like if you could see in real time what Nancy Pelosi was investing it - shadow her trades and make big bucks with the soon to be announced market shifting government deal/regulation/etc.
The markets also open up the door for hedging, arbitration and other sorts of opportunities where you don't necessarily even care what the result is.
Some predictions are like "How many shoes will be thrown at the next Bush speech?" Just the presence of the question affects the outcome.
For a specific example, see the WNBA green sex toy Polymarket betting debacle.
Right, and that is not some grand secret. Every person taking a side on the bet is aware of that nuance for any trivially gamed market. If you think the size of the market is sufficient to incentivize somebody to do so then that would obviously increase the yes odds.
It's akin to betting on penny stocks in the market where you are also aware that a single person could dramatically shift the market one way or the other if they wanted so you're betting not just on the stock's performance, but also on the meta-market.
The public didn’t even learn the most searched term from the market. The public had a better idea it might be “d4vd” from the market, but only slightly before they learned it for real from Google.
What I can’t figure out is why this person is being charged but the companies running the bets are not.
yes it is good in many scenarios.
Imagine bad (incorrect and potentially harmful) information is public knowledge. Examples are "X cures cancer" or "Is Y dangerous to consume".
A prediction market will be seeded by public knowledge (of course it cures cancer or its safe to consume), which you describe "suckers". History is filled with many examples of bad public knowledge that turned out to be false (e.g. DDT is safe pesticide).
An insider (someone who knows the drug trial results, or works at the Corp creating the harmful substance) is incentivized to trade on that knowledge, which creates a better informed public (via people who pay attention to prediction markets).
Why does secret(insider) knowledge exist? To the benefit of the organization that wants to keep the knowledge secret. Insider trading laws purpose is to keep Corp and gov orgs in power. They prevent the dissemination of true information (for private power). Prediction markets incentivize the dissemination of true information, a public good.
Unless of course the evil DDT corp bets money on it being safe, skewing the market.
That is the beauty of the Resolution part of prediction markets. If evil DDT Corp bets money to skew the market, then they lose even more money on the Resolution (assuming the resolution is deterministic of harm and has not been manipulated).
Oh good, the entire premise of the value of the system rests on an axiom with such giant and obvious flaws that you could drive a supertanker through it.
Does the resolution use the scientific paper that says "DDT is safe" or the one that says "DDT is unsafe"? There's no objective resolution of scientific facts.
"Prediction markets provide better information" in the exact same way that "Markets are efficient". You need to interrogate what "Better information"/"efficient" actually means even if you take the claim at face value, and also it's just not a model that maps to reality well.
insider trading is bad because it drains liquidity from the markets which reduces its predictive power
if i am the uninformed, without insider trading laws what is the incentive for me to bet when I know there are insiders?
> Is this good?
it is good if the losers are voluntarily participating. They are not coerced (stupidity is not coercion) into it, and therefore, it is reasonable that they expected to win the bet.
The only problem i have with polymarket (and others like it) are that insiders can often remain anonymous. It should not, and if an insider earns, but their win requires they remain anonymous or face some social/reputational repercussions, then that should happen.
Therefore, as long as KYC is enforced for these markets, i would have zero issues with their existence.
In most modern societies, we regulate all sorts of things that people would otherwise willingly do to their own detriment. We ban drugs; we have labor laws; we have usury laws; we require seatbelts; we have securities regulations; etc. (Notably, until very recently, this included most forms of gambling.)
So the mere fact that losers are voluntary does not, IMO, make the situation good.
all of those things you mentioned have damages sustained on third parties that did not have consent. And tbh, my opinion is that the banning of drugs have done more harm than not banning it (but instead, allow it to be sold safely and cheaply).
Gambling to me, is like that. Banning it doesn't stop it, and it has barely any harm other than to the person who over-indulge. Regulating it is a good idea - where regulating means there's oversight on cheating, on the platform's governance etc.
Nope, nope, nope.
Gambling addiction has impacts beyond the person gambling, because we live in a society. They might gamble away their kid's college fund, lose their house, or resort to stealing money from family members. When they take out loans that they default on, it impacts the balls and raises costs for everyone else.
All of these are very similar to secondary and societal effects of hard drug addiction. It should at the very least be regulated. And most being is worthless from an information standpoint, so isn't providing any societal upside - a man doesn't hurt us. The world was strictly better before we had rampant gambling everywhere.
> all of those things you mentioned have damages sustained on third parties that did not have consent.
The family that suddenly finds themselves homeless because one parent decided to go deep into debt to fuel their gambling addiction sure seems to have "damages sustained on third parties that did not have consent."
> They are not coerced (stupidity is not coercion) into it
They are coerced in the same way as any other gambling: the false allure of easy money in a society built on financial struggle.
Are they voluntarily participating if they’re being lied to about what they’re participating in? What distinguishes the whole thing from fraud?
And the natural end point of this logic is called the lemon problem.
It's been written about extensively and is in every undergraduate economics course.
How have dots not been connected?
Yep. It’s basically how Wall Street functioned before regulations showed up to protect the public.
That’s the academic theory behind these markets, but there’s no actual value to knowing who the most searched celebrity will be or any of this other garbage. It’s just an unregulated casino with guesses about the popularity of Google searches instead of guessing black or red.
If it's unregulated, how are people getting charged with insider trading?
It's not being regulated as a casino (which would limit what the casino could do). It is being regulated, to a limited extent, like a commodity market (which does limit what the participants can do).
If 0.01% of people engaging in insider trading are caught and prosecuted, it is effectively unregulated.
I believe Polymarket wants it to fall under the regulations of cftc as it is implemented like an option/event contract. And cftc says that they don't care about which technology is used. But as far as I now this is the first case it will be tested for real and the views of cftc and a judge may not be the same. I fail to see how it can be classified as insider trading. But, it is till fraud so I'm not sure how much it matters in the end.
How is it fraud? Wouldnt it just be a tos violation?
In my view, anyone participating in these markets does so knowing that the outcomes are within the control of other participants. I can't think of any other reason individual account activity is public.
US have wire fraud laws which I believe includes this. But it will be an interesting case to follow. Personally I don't see anything that should be a crime here at all.
It’s not rare nowadays that speculation on some topic will include the Polymarket rates. Google searches: Maybe not. Maybe that’s just gambling for the fun of it.
Sure, but let’s consider the bet the accused took: who is the most searched person in 2025. What benefit is there in knowing this ahead of time? Who is making decisions based on this?
Also, who is taking the other side of these bets?
I understand betting on something as a hedge - for example a farmer betting there will be no rain as a way to hedge the failure of his crops.
But nobodies life depends which singer is most searched (apart from maybe the singers themselves trying to have a more stable income). Surely that doesn't equate to millions of dollars though.
If you were going to write a article or print a magazine cover , you might want to know this.
You could also take the other side to hedge some risk. It's up to them to define the value, not you for them.
The other question you could be asking: Why does Google want to keep this secret for a period of time?
If you run a records company I assume this might be worth some money
As opposed to the publicly available Google Trends data? As opposed to running legitimate market research? Wouldn't you rather know the most searched person in your vertical, market, etc?
The data in this example was going to be made public anyways. All the examples of prediction markets are predicated on them becoming public. You not only need the info, you need the info before it becomes public.
> you need the info before it becomes public.
and that's exactly how the Google engineer made money, right? He knew it beforehand, and once it was made public other people did too
Realtime access to internal Google search data may help you predict a lot of things that might be worth money, for example there's an existing market where companies buy usage estimation for competitors products (not though Google). I don't see why so many people are completely sure this information is worthless
It's not always enough to know what - the why is often important.
For example, d4vd is a famous musician, and search stats may indicate his potential popularity and future record sales.
Or the public may be searching his name to find out more about the body found in his car, and the subsequent murder investigation and arrest.
> For example, d4vd is a famous musician, and search stats may indicate his potential popularity and future record sales.
I wasn't really aware of that as I guess I am not the target demography. However, I can think of multiple ways of making money off this information, I still don't see why people are so sure it is worthless
So far it seems insiders are mostly incentivized to bet on their insider information at the last possible minute, so that the market doesn't have time to adjust toward their position and lessen their profits. That doesn't leave non-insiders a lot of time to do anything useful with the information, even if it happens to be something that would benefit them to know about.
You are correct, but you say this like the prediction markets are open about this fact. They aren't and if you ask them they will deny this.
I think they are open about it. John Oliver did a piece on it last month and I recall an interview where the founder of one of these prediction markets shared this as a beneficial effect of the product.
I once asked in Kalshi subreddit if insider trading was the entire point and my post was removed by the mods..
That [getting banned] doesn't tell you anything really, they probably just thought you were a troll.
I get banned from subs sometimes by just asking a opposing question.
They literally have a marketing page about how they are "different" https://kalshi.com/policy-center/insider-trading
Nice try to make crimes sound legal.
Nice try to make a law sound moral.
If you want moral turn to religion.
But I bet (pun intended) many of them teach giving away other people‘s secrets (including companies and governments) for personal profit is wrong.
Imagine Venezuela getting information on the planned abduction of Maduro because of him https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-soldier-charged-using-clas...
Could have been a harder fight with more causalities
Couldn’t that same argument be used to justify stock market insider trading? The problem with insiders is not just that they can surface information, but they can actually manipulate the results. It’s why baseball players can’t bet on the results of their games, even if a prediction market guru might argue “their bets surface valuable information” or something.
That’s not the basis of insider trading in US securities law. US securities insider trading is premised on the idea that insiders are stealing from people they have an obligation to (the shareholders).
Cool. So we benefit by prediction markets surfacing insider information about Trump's plans in the Iran conflict, and unknown insiders making hundreds of millions on that information with massive trades minutes before each announcement benefited the people watching prices in the oil market? That doesn't seem right.
Hmm, not following. The insider trade in this case was small enough to not change the lines meaningfully, no? D4vd's chances of being #1 went from <1% to >99% nearly overnight, was a huge upset.
Polymarket might be different, but conventional Vegas-style lines change with the amount of $$ bet, if the pool is $50M and an insider bets $10k on the long shot, the line isn't moving -- I don't see how insider information can be surfaced in this scenario except after the fact (and only maybe then).
In other words, if the line changes enough to signal insider info, it's not really insider info anymore.
Because these markets aren't all that efficient yet (possibly because other potential market participants are scared off by insider trading charges). You don't have multiple people that all have insider information betting against each other, you have one person with insider information that cleans out everybody else. If this repeats enough, all the people without insider information will get cleaned out and exit the market, all the other people with insider information will enter the market for profit, and prices should converge to true likelihood.
And yes, the whole purpose of prediction markets is to turn insider info into public info.
> And yes, the whole purpose of prediction markets is to turn insider info into public info.
You realize that betting on an event you have insider info on is against their terms and conditions, right? So while it may be your personal goal, it's certainly not Polymarket's or Kalshi's.
if the only people remaining are insiders, the market is effectively nonexistent because nobody is going to take the other side of the trade
But you just said "The benefit is to people watching the prices" -- but if the odds haven't properly converged what information does watching the prices get you before-the-fact?
Maybe I'm just not getting it, could you lay out a scenario?
> if the odds haven't properly converged what information does watching the prices get you before-the-fact?
How do you know we are "before-the fact"? Because these numbers are bananas?
Somebody just tanked their job, their life, for a million bucks.
Anybody who took that bet, might've individually spent only a few bucks to see that.
Everyone else (the people watching) learned the price of entertainment is a few bucks, and ruining someone's life is a million bucks.
Was that a surprise to you? If not, then the (market) prices may be said to have converged (close to) reality.
But maybe it is, and you think people would ruin their lives for less, or would pay more for human misery. In any event, the distance between whatever you think that probability is, and the return earned on these odds is information, that we all can enjoy (as benefit) before-the-fact.
The point is to make money by letting people gamble on the future. What you said is a second order effect of doing the first thing. They should at least be regulated under gambling laws, doesnt make sense without it
This was also previously known as witch hunts.
What Polymarket says on the topic (https://integrity.polymarket.com/) is that they do not surface insider information and you mustn't trade if you have any.
Because the prediction market community is filled with liars and fraudsters, of course, it does seem to be common knowledge that this restriction isn't meant to be taken seriously, much like Polymarket's fake rule that Americans aren't allowed to use it.
But once you start from the premise that everything prediction markets say about their rules and practices is a lie, why should we believe they provide any genuine signal for anything?
The odds have shown to be largely correct, thanks to people profitably arbitraging away inaccuracies.
that's literally how ANY market works. there's nothing special about prediction markets.
if you know NVDA's earnings before it's announced, it's no different than knowing who the most googled musician would be before it's announced.
I read a data point that 78% of profits are made by 1% of users on Kalshi
Less than 3% of regular sports bettors are consistently profitable, with an estimated 1% to 2% of players winning the vast majority of all available money. The remaining 97-99% of players—who treat betting as a casual hobby rather than a professional endeavor—end up losing money over time.
If gambling was more profitable for more people it wouldn't be called gambling. Might have some clever name like the NYSE.
We would be much better off as society if bettors and gamblers actually learned from their lessons. Unfortunately that's not how it works.
Also, at least on Polymarket, beware of those who can influence the settlement of the wager, which may settle not in concordance with the actual outcome in reality.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1jki1lj/pol...
The real money is in providing liquidity if you don't have insider knowledge.
Well you either get XKCD 1570 or Jane Street.
https://xkcd.com/1570/
Not much in between. The efficient market hypothesis claims many victims.
Don't most gamblers already know that its all a scam and the house always wins?
Who says you have to bet against them? In Polymarket you can choose either side of a bet.
Or figure out which bet is insider info and profit?
Yup, same with any kind of betting - sport, even draw games. There are obviously stories that someone managed to "game the system", like a man who figured out how to find winning scratch cards (Mohan Srivastava case) or Željko Ranogajec winning in Keno, but the point is that in the first case it was luck + skills, in the second it was overcoming the TOS by creating a lot of fake accounts, that's why the guy had to give his win back (details of the agreement were not revealed).
You bet against skilled people who set the stakes, so, yes, by observing numbers you can win in Keno, but if you comply to the TOS you will not win big money. The only chance to be able to "game the system" is to bet on something that lotteries brokers does not have time to look at, like 3rd Bulgarian bocce league matches.
The problem is that you need to somehow become an expert in 3rd Bulgarian bocce league and the money which are there are generally small.
I was investigating this (again) when AI showed up, as in theory it makes easier some analysis, but the big guys are also using AI.
Most sports betting markets have a degree of unpredictability, and bookmakers will ban sharps (those falling outside the statistical norm or continually hitting lines just before the market moves).
Betting on a final score in most markets is fine.
When betting gets extremely narrow and specific e.g. "Player X will be subbed on for Player Y" it gets morally dubious.
There is a lot of overlap with insurance markets. The incentives have to be aligned (life insurance) with sensible guard rails against abuse (cooling off periods to be covered for suicide)
That's a very naive take of someone who never professionally traded. There are liquidity providing, market making trading strategies that work in absence of insider information.
This is true of all markets.
I was curious how a man in Switzerland gets charged in the US for a placing bets on a site that doesn't allow the US to participate.
The short answer seems to be that he stole private information from a US company and used that information to enrich himself. And then got that charge enhanced with things like wire fraud and transacting on systems involving US currency.
And another commentor suggests that punishing insider traders in a step towards legitimzing and regulating prediction markets in the US.
You can charge anyone in the world with anything, the trouble is getting a judge to agree with you and getting your hands on the person you're charging.
The first problem doesn't seem to be all that hard in the US (unless the inside traders are part of the US government, of course), the second problem can be as simple as having Google organise an all-expenses-paid team activity to bait the subject into jurisdiction.
If the basis for their charges really is just that he traded in dollars, then this is yet another example why nobody should trust Americans and their currency when it comes to trade. I hope they can come up with something better than that.
> the second problem can be as simple as having Google organise an all-expenses-paid team activity to bait the subject into jurisdiction.
This actually happens. I know that the FBI once organized an all-expenses-paid trip to a "conference in Hawaii" for certain Chinese chemists it wanted to nab.
The corollary is that if you have reason to expect you're wanted by American Feds, never travel outside China, Russia, and certain European states that are extraordinarily hesitant to extradite to the US (e.g. Ireland).
And never have an emergency (accidentally, FBI-forced landing, etc) causing you to accidentally inhabit those countries either.
I thought I'd heard of this but couldn't find enough examples of this, let alone an FBI induced landing.
It appears REALLY hard to step over jurisdictions.
I did find the PLO terrorist incident from 1985. The terrorists killed an American on a cruiseship, Achille Lauro. Reagan sent a fighter jet to intercept, escort, and force a landing in Italy for the commercial jet the terrorists were later flying on.
There are other examples like forcing downed flights in the hunt for Snowden, but it's super rare and ultimately unlikely.
The interesting part is that he got charged with insider trading. A few attorneys on bluesky have pointed out that this is a novel use of this law since previously the trading occurred on regulated markets (e.g. SEC or CFTC regulated markets like stock markets and commodities/futures exchanges).
They are regulated. That's why Connecticut, Arizona, and Illinois are being sued by the government. They tried to regulate these markets and the CFTC says they regulate them, not the states.
These markets are regulated by the CFTC, currently, so what exactly is novel here?
Poly market is not a us exchange. Kalshi is.
So is Polymarket US, the separate entity Polymarket created specifically for the USA.
The argument goes that because Polymarket (.com) doesn't effectively block US users, it is in practice operating in the US even though it claims not to be. Similar to how the EU claims jurisdiction over foreign sites that process EU citizen data for GDPR.
US charged and arrested a man in Venezuela so...
Don’t think they will mobilize 40 elite soldiers to invade Switzerland airspace just because of a small sum of a million dollars
He doesn't have any oil. Therefore the US won't invade.
They don't need to because he has already been arrested in New York.
There should be some sort of basic literacy requirement for people to post of this forum.
Don’t so hard on yourself.
A little bit of an open secret, but insider trading is a large part of what makes prediction markets valuable to society on the whole.
However, it requires a small set of people to lose money so that the rest of us can have a clearer picture of the future.
> transacting on systems involving US currency.
Transacting on systems involving a currency (USDC) that is pegged to a US currency.
Pretty sure he sold Swiss Francs for USDC and deposited those onto Polymarket (after running them through mixers -- hence the money laundering charges).
He was arrested in New York, so he was in the US
That doesn't mean he has committed a crime in the US though.
So, after doing some light Googling and AI research, this doesn’t seem to be strictly an “insider trading” charge from the SEC.
It looks more like a broader fraud case. The charges are commodities fraud / Commodity Exchange Act violation, wire fraud, and money laundering, and the case is being brought by the DOJ.
So, lawyers, please correct me if I’m wrong, but this feels more like prosecutors found a legal framework to charge him for conduct that resembles insider trading. By contrast, if he had sold Google stock based on insider knowledge, that would have more directly implicated SEC insider trading rules.
So, functionally, it feels like an insider trading case, but technically, it isn’t one.
My understanding - "insider trading" is specifically for securities, and brought by the SEC. The equivalent for commodities is called "market manipulation", brought by the CFTC. Market manipulation is a much harder thing to prove than insider trading.
This kind of reminds me of the OpenSea "insider trading" scandal. [0]
Not a lawyer, not legal advice, etc.
[0] - https://www.mayerbrown.com/en/insights/publications/2025/09/...
Yeah I’m not entirely sure how what he did was illegal. I hope he can afford good attorneys. Hard to see this as anything other than a way to take the heat off the White House for using insider information to profit on prop betting sites.
The charges are a bit funny. [1] "From at least in or about October 2025 up to and including at least in or about December 2025, in the Southern District of New York and elsewhere outside of the jurisdiction of any particular State or district of the United States".
Um yes, everywhere is either inside of or outside of the jurisdiction of SDNY. But argueable, if you're charging somebody it only matters if it's _inside of_.
[1]: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/media/1442621/dl
I think your reading of SDNY jurisdiction is a misreading. The SDNY is the venue for where the DOJ is charging them, which is fairly common for financial crime cases.
Right. I was very surprised because there aren't laws against insider trading on prediction markets.
So I genuinely don't understand what he is being charged with. What precisely is the "fraud"? The entire point of prediction markets is to get people with better information to participate, i.e. "insiders".
Insider trading with public corporations has tons of specific laws around it to clearly define what is insider information and what isn't. Prediction markets don't have any of that.
And the article does nothing whatsoever to clarify what the heck the actual fraud is supposed to be.
(And I understand this is against Google policy, but that's not what this is about.)
yes notably it is also not a civil case being brought by google for breaking the NDA
That's aweful, only senators should be allowed to do that!
The Senate unanimously changed their rules last month to explicitly block senators and staff from engaging in prediction markets. https://news.bgov.com/bloomberg-government-news/senators-agr...
The House has not (yet, at least) adopted any such rule.
Interesting to see that insider trading is considered illegal after all.
When will the white house insiders see the same fate?
Well, you see, the house always wins
In fascism, laws are for binding the out groups.
Why are we wasting government money cracking down on Polymarket betting? The most offensive thing in this article is the government pretending Polymarket bets are securities. Prediction markets provide no benefit to society and don't need to exist.
> pretending Polymarket bets are securities
No, they are pretending they are _commodities_. Pretending things are securities is disfavoured by the current administration.
> government pretending Polymarket bets are securities
Crypto prediction markets have an interest in being regulated like traditional exchanges since it opens up access to Wall Street market makers for increased liquidity.
Isn't that stock market a prediction market?
No, as the name sort of suggests, it's a stock market. As in, it's a place for people to buy stakes in companies, and occasionally a place for companies to raise money by selling stakes in themselves.
> (…) provide no benefit to society and don't need to exist.
The sounds extremely fascist.
TIL fascism is when you let states regulate gambling because of the public interest and lack of public benefit.
Fascism is when seatbelts
You do not know what this word means, please consider educating yourself before using it again.
If you're playing a poker game and you look around the table and and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you.
- Paul Newman
I’m completely failing to get outraged here.
I think that the person misused Google internal information and deserves termination or other discipline, but I’m struggling to otherwise see the harm in what they did. Is insider trading a crime on prediction markets? Doesn’t it contribute to the accuracy of the pricing of prediction contracts, and therefore is good for the prediction market?
> Is insider trading a crime on prediction markets?
Yes, it is both against the CFTC's regulations and against the companies' T&Cs.
> Doesn’t it contribute to the accuracy of the pricing of prediction contracts, and therefore is good for the prediction market?
That's irrelevant, the purpose of these markets is to provide fair bets for entertainment, not information.
> the purpose of these markets is to provide fair bets for entertainment
Pretty sure this statement is 100% wrong. You’re describing a gambling site. Is that how governments are treating them?
> against the companies' T&Cs
Not a crime, or certainly shouldn't be.
Not criminal but fraud is still a crime.
But also I don't think the T&C's came into play here. This is strictly his employer (Google) told him to keep this information confidential and he didn't and instead profited from it.
By entertainment I assume you mean money laundering?
b. lobbied the president to attack Iran
c. neglected critical aid spreading Ebola
By the way there are reasons why we ban sport people from betting or insiders to disclose their (and relatives) trades to the sec: incentives.
It seems like the prediction market crowd cannot understand the economics of incentives and their harmful consequences.
Even though we already see the harm in the real world with journalists receiving death threats for reporting news or randoms tampering with meteorological equipment to win bets.
And that's only what we know.
Pretty ironic find: Extracting knowledge from cryptocurrencies - Michele Spagnuolo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9P04hm7tmgs
> He did not enter a plea and was released on a $2.25 million bond
I'm not familiar with the US system of bond. Is this payment a kind of fine that you don't get back, or a temporary payment? And what does it give you? I mean if prosecuted you get prison anyway, right?
it's a temporary payment that gets returned when certain obligations are met (often at the end of trial when you're either free to go or going to prison). Bail also often comes with conditions like an ankle monitor, drug/alcohol testing, staying within a certain state... etc. Part of the idea is that you want that money back so you'll be on your best behavior and comply.
Tangentially, it's really important to be out on bail while your court case progresses. Access to lawyers, income, friends, support, research, etc is a critical factor in preparing your defense.
Here's a fun paper https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/695285
In the US, unless you have that much cash lying around, you have to borrow the money from a bail bondsman. They typically charge 10% for loaning you the money, and they're out the dough if you skip bail.
It’s temporary, yes. Basically just collateral to promise you’ll show up for the court hearings.
Often they’re paid through bondsman who finance bonds (you pay them a fee). Which also results in a bounty hunting industry for the people that do run away.
Also of note, if you can’t pay the fee or give the bondsman some collateral for his service, your court date may be many months or even years in the future and the date can be postponed many times along the way. So you will be in jail that whole time. If you’re given a prison sentence, time served is usually applied towards it. If you’re found innocent or otherwise not given a prison sentence, your life was just ruined. It’s kind of a bad deal but mostly hurts the poor so nobody cares to fix it.
Innocent until proven guilty is kind of a lie. The US has so many edge cases like this where our US Constitutional rights have been severely neutered.
It's temporary, yes. If you show up for your court date it's returned to you - it's collateral.
There is some differences between bail and bond, but basically the same thing. Is a payment that lets you out of prison until trial under conditions. If you break conditions, payment is forfeited, but returned otherwise
This is because time to trial/actual trial itself can take a long time and there is generally dislike of keeping a person in confinement on the chance they are innocent.
Anderson Cooper: But predictive markets do rely on someone having some inside information.
Shayne Coplan: Uh-huh. Yeah. I think that people going and having an edge to the market is a good thing. Obviously, you need to curate them and you need to be really clear and stringent on where the line is drawn and, like, sort of ethics and we spend a lot of time on that. But it's sort of an inevitability that this will happen, and there's a lot of benefits from it. And, you know, people will adapt.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/polymarket-ceo-shayne-coplan-on...
“and, like, sort of ethics”
they spent a lot of time on it!
If you worked at Google for 12 years, it seems pretty irrational to commit this kind of crime for only $1M.
Maybe there’s a chance he can get pardoned before 2029 lol
> If you worked at Google for 12 years, it seems pretty irrational to commit this kind of crime for only $1M.
Person who has been working in a single FAANG for decade+ without job-hopping could have had quite minor refreshers during their tenure, so you shouldn't automatically assume they are rich.
> If you worked at Google for 12 years, it seems pretty irrational to commit this kind of crime for only $1M.
Kinda? It's not like people making an order of magnitude less don't get busted for crimes where they're stealing an order of magnitude less.
I think the point the grandparent comment is trying to make is that at a staff level, and having been at google for 12 years, he was likely being paid pretty well, and that he could've made that same money longer term just by continuing to work at google
Interesting the federal government can't seem to find the resources to investigate their own internal insider trading related to war and foreign policy.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-soldier-charged-using-clas...
If he had made less money doing it he probably would have gotten away with it.
NSA employees must be the final boss of this kind of stuff.
Well at least if they were gambling they wouldn't be in danger of arrest.
A few more cases like this and people will go back to gambling
So now the real bet he lost is salary + time for all those years he is going to prision + lower job for decades after prison. This person bet Millions to get $1M basically and lost both, very rare gambling level lost from smart(used to) person. At least normal gambler loses what they have and some debt.
He was Staff-level as well. That's minimum $500k a year or more. And tenure often grows pay disproportionately at Google. That's easily $20 million lost.
You're making a bold assumption that this is the first time they're making money off of these bets.
It's possible he had multiple accounts but seems unlikely, one reason he was caught was because he made a whole bunch of trades on markets related to "year in search", all on one account, and all the trades were perfect. If he was thinking about creating new accounts to obscure himself then he should have at least made each bet he placed on a seperate account.
People (particularly those committing crimes) do frequently overlook things in inconsistent ways, so it's possible. But seems unlikely to me.
So are we going to regulate these things or what?
See also: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/24/us/how-prediction-markets...
What would happen if some regular Joe, completely unrelated to any other user, watched for bets that could signal insider information and made significant profit themselves, too?
That's called "copy trading", which has been around for decades.
If there's no connection between you and the trade you're copying, there's nothing you can be charged with. Normally there's a natural latency between the "signal" trade (i.e. the trade to copy), and the copy trade, which obviously can alter the profitability. This latency can range from sub-seconds if there's some public ledger, to days/weeks/months if the info is due to disclosure. Obviously when it comes to crypto and public ledgers, we're on the former.
But as soon as you place such trades based on insider trading, that's insider trading.
fair number of people do this, bunch of free tools to filter by this criteria (brand new account, more than $xx,xxx size), vulnerable to spoofing obviously
This is where a lot of the crypto scammers on x have moved, selling ai/bots to do this. It seems like the odds slip significantly after these large bets are filled.
This is a trade that is already done by trading businesses. It doesn’t even need to be this explicit; you could for instance dispose one side of a trade to reduce exposure to insiders.
polymarket should be illegal, challenge me.
Prohibition just drives vices into a black market. In this case, probably just with VPNs to offshore betting markets where users would have less legal recourse. Nobody ever regulated insider trading in gambling _until_ the CFTC started authorising predictions markets.
There's manipulation going on, but if you fight that, why do you feel that prediction markets should be illegal?
The stock market should be illegal too. The stock market is just a prediction market at this point. What value does it create?
> The stock market is just a prediction market at this point.
Not really. But I can get your point.
I am confused. Are bets considered securities? I thought the CFTC and insider dealing laws applied to securities, not betting.
If they recognize they are betting companies, they have no right to operate in the majority of the states. So, they found the CFTC willing to pretend that these betting contracts are in fact securities, and that is how they can legally operate.
Commodities, not securities. The CFTC doesn’t regulate securities.
Forbes flagged this account back in December and it still took prosecutors months to charge him.
Yes, what did you expect? That’s amazingly fast for federal prosecutors.
It does take a while for all warrants to be in place, run the investigation and tie up all loose ends.. 6 months is fast by bureaucracy standards.
The fact that he happened to be in NY is a lucky shot for the prosecutors.
Also they needed to wait for the person to travel to the US.
And that lad is of course an information security engineer
prediction markets have become like the "modern" version of crypto "get rich quick" mania of the nft era.
grifters gonna grift where they see an opportunity. also got the money printer turned on for some while the others resort to "chance" (fair or otherwise) to get paid.
Meanwhile His Royal Highness is free to do as he please. Got even life time immunity deal as well
Wait what? What "bets"? Bets can happen only on the gambling sites, and Polymarket is definitely not one of those, right? Poly is a prediction market, rewarding the person with the best prediction. How can there be "insider trading" on a site rewarding best information? The USA corporate and regulatory hypocrisy is off the charts :)
Like it’s nice to see someone get charged for using insider knowledge to win at prediction markets, but are we seriously just going to say this is the first big case and not any of the suspiciously accurate accounts created immediately before Iran War events?
I fucking hate this double standard hypocrisy. Leading by example means if your political or corporate leaders can game the system then so can you, I say.
Isn't this been what some (so far) unnamed Trump administration people have been doing?
How could this be insider trading? Polymarket has nothing to do with financial securities. A bet on Polymarket is like trading any other crypto asset.
Polymarket US is only able to operate in the USA because it is being regulated by the CFTC as a securities market. Otherwise, they would have been seen as a gambling site and would have been banned virtually everywhere.
So they hanged a nobody while the person who made even more with white house insider trading announcements by the president goes scotch free?
Trump's family and their cronies have a free pardon waiting for them the day they get convicted. Better wait until the next regime shift, spending money on trying to prosecute the insiders now is just a waste of everyone's time and money. So far Trump has pardoned the 1/6 insurrectionists without any consequences, pardoning someone for a little white collar crime is barely going to hit the news cycle.
Anyone could have run the list of candidate names from the bets through google trends right?
There's an end-of-year Google trends wrapped that the employee pulled off an internal system before it was public.
I’m curious how he got caught. Polymarket accounts should be untraceable
> Polymarket accounts should be untraceable
The funding/retrieval chain normally isn't if you want to spend the money in real world goods and services.
There's another way to find out, which is to track things from the other side. Highly likely Google has access logs on the data.
Prob googled "how to bet with privileged info and not get caught".
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48301808
Is that even illegal?
Wow. WTF does this say about Google algorithmic manipulation if an employee can predict specific search results to such a granular extent... Down to a specific artist. Google is rigged.
> if an employee can predict specific search results to such a granular extent
It's not a prediction, it's a query in a tool/database that's supposed to hold counts.
There's no rigging here - it's just a summary of historical data being accessed and used before being public, in violation of confidentiality agreements. If he had just sourced the data without acting on it, the system would have still logged somewhere, but likely nobody would have looked at it. My understanding is that the last couple weeks before being released won't dramatically change counts unless an extraordinary event happens that drowns the last 11 months of data.