From NPR yesterday? (6 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47156858

Or Axios yesterday (Kyle Langford + Artem Kaptur(Mr Beast Aid)) https://www.axios.com/2026/02/25/kalshi-insider-trading-susp...

No doubt. Sports betting too. I’m a curmudgeon but we should completely unwind to the pre-lottery days when organized gambling was simply not legal.

A good reason to allow it is because people want to do it and it is as relatively harmful as many other normative human behaviors.. A better reason is that it provides a means of measure real attitudes and opinions. The revealed prices afforded by prediction markets is interesting at the least, and possibly the best source of information for many of topics.

Polymarket and Kalshi have just been declared gambling under New Zealand law, and therefore 'investing' in them is now illegal for New Zealanders. Both companies have been ordered to stop providing services to New Zealanders [0]

0. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/587993/why-betting-on-to...

There are prediction markets on a number of questions (most prominently about politics) where people have good reasons besides entertainment value to want to know the answers.

I agree that it's disappointing that so much of it has ended up being sports betting, and would be in favor of targeted regulations to deemphasize that in favor of more socially useful topics.

I’ll admit that in my younger days, reading Bryan Caplan and Nassim Taleb, I got caught up in the starry-eyed fantasizing about prediction markets that was (and still is) widespread in the libertarian corners of the internet. Force people to put their money where their mouth is! Combining the wisdom of crowds with Superforecasters will lead to vastly improved decision-making! Prediction markets will be so accurate eventually we’ll run the government on them! It sounds so good on paper.

The reality has been rather different. It’s just another form of gambling that’s wrecking people’s lives, and it's not obvious to me that they’re even very good at forecasting, which might help make up for it (the absurdly overpriced markets re: “is LK-99 a room-temperature superconductor” were one example). It was an interesting hypothesis but a failed experiment: shut it down and move on.

Can I just get Joe Camel and smoking sections back please?

Every gas station in this traditional blue law state has beer and slot machines now!

Bring back Joe Camel!!

My understanding is the original value these markets create is the ability to hedge risk.

If you're worried an event may impact you materially (like cat 5 hurricane in Florida), then you can place a bet that the event will happen, thus hedging some risk if it does happen.

Insurance companies can participate in these products for the same reasons.

Or if you need to hedge against an event that isn't insurable. For example, if you are a high level democrat party leader and you will lose your job if a republican wins, you might take a bet to hedge your risk if your party looses the next cycle.

The question of what does and doesn't constitute illegal insider trading turns out to be surprisingly subtle, and can vary depending on the type of market. Prediction markets in the U.S. are legally treated as commodities, not as securities like stocks, and insider trading rules for commodities are in some ways less strict. (There are good policy reasons for this; you want to let, e.g., farmers hedge their exposure to the market prices of the stuff they grow, this being the principal reason why we have futures markets, and presumably they have inside information about how their crops are doing.)

Specifically, the CFTC's rules say that it's illegal to "misappropriate confidential information in breach of a pre-existing duty of trust and confidence to the source of the information" by using that information to inform your commodity trades. The MrBeast editor likely did that, but the gubernatorial candidate didn't (he didn't promise anyone that he'd keep his candidacy secret), so if it were just up to government regulators and not platform rules, he'd be in the clear.

Matt Levine writes about this a lot (and is both funny and astonishingly good at explaining the workings of financial capitalism to laypeople); most recently he did so about this particular case: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-02-25/kal...

These platforms actually seem like a great way to run sports betting to me. Much better than what the actual companies are doing trying to write their own books and risking arbitrage.