u/EmbarrassedStudent10

The financial services firm said Wednesday that it plans to offer its roughly 3,000 institutional clients access to prediction markets trading on Kalshi, making it one of the first full-service investment banks to give institutional clients access to block trades in event contracts on a CFTC-regulated exchange.

Kalshi’s market maker Susquehanna International Group will provide pricing and liquidity, the company said in a statement, while Cantor will be the acting broker, helping clients arrange and execute the trades.

“Prediction markets are growing rapidly, but institutional participation has not kept pace because investors have lacked the ability to transact at scale on a regulated exchange,” Pascal Bandelier, co-CEO and global head of equities at Cantor, said in a statement. “The liquidity is here."

Djdjdjekekek was up +$2.2M all-time on Polymarket, mostly betting on CS2 and Dota

then somehow decided to speedrun bankruptcy

-$1.7M on August 12
-$1.2M the next day

by August 15, he was down almost $2.9M in a single week

his biggest win ever was a $1M bag on Falcons vs Liquid

and now some of his biggest losses are coming from the same esports markets:

-$770K on Vitality vs 100 Thieves
-$487K on PARIVISION vs B8

and hundreds of thousands more across TI matches

was up millions thanks to esports

https://preview.redd.it/rmidxe5299kh1.png?width=1179&format=png&auto=webp&s=f498cf1c3def60b9fac9dbd76d2d8fcd177c6b02

An anonymous trader on Polymarket holds a No position on the CLARITY Act worth about $414,895, roughly 2.6 times larger than the $160,200 in liquidity currently available on the market where it sits.

Predictbook identified on Aug. 11 that the account was newly created, with no trading history before this position began. The trader deposited about $499,999 in USDC and spent roughly $398,122 building the No side across three trades.

The final two trades landed roughly 14 hours past the first, adding about 382,601 shares at average prices near 75.55 cents and 77.61 cents.

The account held 515,398 No shares when the report was published, making it the market's third-largest No holder at the time, with roughly $101,877 left unspent, equal to about 64% of displayed liquidity.

Traders on Polymarket are currently paying 17¢ for a Wildberries bankruptcy before 2027 following 20+ Ukrainian drone strikes hitting their warehouses. Meanwhile, the "NO bankruptcy" side costs 83¢ (paying a ~20.5% return by Dec 31).

Why the "YES" side is likely mispricing the risk:

• Wildberries handles 45% of all Russian e-commerce ($67B turnover) and is one of the largest borrowers in the Russian banking system.
• The Kremlin confirmed talks are already happening to deploy state bank loans and tax subsidies to prop them up.
• Days before the strikes began, Wildberries updated seller contracts to exclude drone damage, meaning individual third-party merchants take the hit rather than the platform itself.

The 17% "YES" price relies heavily on headline shock. In reality, the Kremlin isn't going to let its retail infrastructure and banking sector collapse when it can just print rubles or issue state loans.

Traders are paying 9¢ for a 3rd GTA 6 delay on Polymarket, while the "NO delay" side costs 91¢ (yielding ~10% by Nov 19).

Why a last minute delay looks historically unlikely:

• Rockstar gave 201 days' notice for the last delay. We are now 95 days out.
• Take-Two just reported $1.39B in net bookings (89% were $100 Ultimate Editions) and kept its $8B+ guidance untouched.

Betting on a delay at 9¢ means betting on an unprecedented last-minute move from Rockstar. Paying 91¢ locks in ~10% in under 3 months if they stick to the playbook.

Silicon Valley’s era-defining technologies often sit on a razor’s edge between utopian and dystopian.

The sharing economy promised communal exchange at the tap of a smart phone — or risking it all by jumping in a stranger’s car, or trusting others to deliver. (It largely ended up being more banal: convenient, smartphone-enhanced regulatory arbitrage.)

AI is giving everyone a genius at their fingertips — or creating a super-intelligence that will put us out of jobs and maybe destroy the world.

Juul was a way for cigarette addicts to get off the hard stuff and do something safer — until it became clear it was instead another gateway to addiction, creating a generation of young vape fiends.

Similarly, prediction markets seemed to promise opportunity and insight, a new way to see into the future thanks to the genius of the crowd. But quickly the reality has set in: Kalshi and Polymarket, which dominate the industry, are primarily places to gamble on sports. Some 80 percent of the trading volume on market leader Kalshi is sports betting.

On top of that, a host of deeply problematic issues have arisen around wagering on events where motivated people can potentially game the results.

As these companies raise more and more money — just this week, Kalshi was reported to be raising at a $40 billion valuation and Polymarket was said to be doing the same at $20 billion — Silicon Valley has to ask itself: if this is really the world that it wants to build? At a moment when there are so many genuinely revolutionary AI companies getting marked up at lightning speed, why spend energy getting young men to waste more and more of their time and money on gambling?

There is a world in which Kalshi and Polymarket and the fleet of emerging rivals serve as truth machines for discerning the wisdom of crowds, and markets for hedging various sorts of risk.

That is not our world. The reality is that the main business of prediction markets is deregulated sports betting, essentially a workaround to state gaming laws that mostly bar wagering by anyone under 21, and ban it entirely in 11 states.

This is legal thanks to the efforts of Michael Selig, the crypto and prediction industry lawyer whom President Trump named to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Selig insists, implausibly but with the power of the government behind him, that the ability of American businesses to freely hedge their risks requires that Washington override all state regulation of sports betting. Selig this week invoked the CFTC’s emergency powers to block legal efforts by the state of New York to ban Kalshi for violating the state’s gambling laws, the latest skirmish in a nationwide fight.

It’s hard to ignore the fact that the industry enjoying such sweetheart regulatory treatment features a highly unusual arrangement where Kalshi and Polymarket, otherwise fierce rivals, both count Donald Trump Jr. as a close advisor (and in the case of Polymarket, the president’s son is also an investor through his 1789 Capital fund).

People have already taken hairdryers to thermometers to win prediction market wagers, which is funny-not-funny in the context of betting on military maneuvers, or wildfires, or flight cancellations. Insider trading of various sorts appears to be rampant on the platforms, despite belated clean-up efforts.

with crypto, prediction markets are fun sandboxes for experimenting with financial structures and trading strategies and theoretically could yield some social goods. Theoretically is the operative word here though.

As

It’s hard to see how the current anything-goes national regulatory regime could survive a Democratic administration, or even a non-Trump Republican one. Regardless, let’s not wait for the horror stories about broke young families or people dying for someone’s parlay. There are plenty of reasons to think twice before joining the prediction market party.

[Source]

Polymarket uses native pUSD, so every deposit involves bridging/swapping your assets into its native stablecoin. It shows a “price impact” warning when you deposit, but that number seems to have little to do with the amount you actually lose.

Polymarket uses Relay Protocol for bridging, whose stablecoin swap fee is only 0.01%.

So when Polymarket shows <0.05% price impact, it already feels expensive for a stablecoin swap.

https://preview.redd.it/85bme7cjkojh1.png?width=397&format=png&auto=webp&s=2d04a004737f11a38c1206ff3bcc6f3e54e7bd36

But after the transaction settles, the actual cost appears to be closer to 0.20%.

That’s a huge difference.

At scale, a 0.20% fee means millions of dollars extracted from Polymarket users. Undisclosed!

[Source]

If you’ve been looking for low-risk, high-probability setups in political prediction markets, there’s a really weird chart playing out right now. It involves a politician who famously stopped flying, and the markets are pricing his outcome as close to a guaranteed lock as you can get.

https://preview.redd.it/h01ftprdlljh1.png?width=949&format=png&auto=webp&s=1245b03d70fee1118d730318916471998bd3edd4

• The Odds: The contract is currently trading at 97¢–98¢, meaning the market is pricing in a 97%+ probability of this outcome hitting.
• The APY Math: While a 2% or 3% return sounds tiny, if you're parking capital in a contract that resolves quickly, the annualized yield (APY) actually crushes standard high-yield savings accounts or T-bills.
• The Catch: You're risking $97 to make $3. If a black swan event happens, you get wiped out. But historically, when these specific political contracts hit 97% this close to the finish line, they resolve YES over 99% of the time.

It’s basically the ultimate "whales parking cash for free yield" market.

Are you guys picking up free pennies on 97¢+ locks like this, or do you prefer holding out for higher-volatility 50/50 plays?

Full chart breakdown and odds history: Read the analysis here

At 3:03 on Tuesday afternoon, a Polymarket wallet took in $156,642.31. Three minutes later, it spent $156,640.12 of it on one player.

Rafael Jódar, 19, ranked 15th, was due on court in Montreal in 3 hours and 14 minutes. The wallet bought 266,349 shares at an average of 58.81 cents in that match's market and then sat there while the match had not started.

Jódar won 7-6, 6-3. At 5:05, with the price at 99.9 and half an hour still to run, the wallet sold everything for $266,069 and withdrew the money. He profited $109,429.

Two days later, he came back, deposited $120,309, and bought 170,728 shares of Ben Shelton 12 and a half hours before the final. Shelton won 6-3, 7-6. It sold at 99.9 at 1:42 this morning and withdrew $170,701.50.

The account is called TennisLove, and it joined in August. What's interesting is that he basically guarantees 100% accuracy in his bio:

>"Accuracy 100%. Eventual predictions. Not daily. Not weekly. Not monthly. Only safe predictions. Sports degen (mostly tennis)."

At the time of writing, he holds no positions, but the wallet certainly piques our interest. It’s worth watching what other bets he makes in tennis. For now, with only 2 bets, he is ranked 1,256th in the world.