Traders placed over $1B in perfectly timed bets on the Iran war

ttrocado about 3 hours ago 66 commentsRead Article on theguardian.com

DE version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

41% Positive

Analyzed from 2531 words in the discussion.

Discussion (66 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

beaviskhan•about 2 hours ago

You'd have to be spectacularly stupid to bet on these kinds of things without having insider knowledge, because you ought to know good and damn well by now that the people with insider knowledge are DEFINITELY betting on them.

3eb7988a1663•about 1 hour ago

Even if you are not "betting" similar trades are happening in the stock market as well. Large movements in oil futures shortly before policy changes are announced.

paulpauper•about 2 hours ago

couldn't you somehow in theory track the order book to if and when insiders are betting and then copy the trade?

andrepd•about 1 hour ago

Not knowing who are the insiders and who is the dumb flow is like the fundamental problem of hft

iknowSFR•about 1 hour ago

You can trade on non-public information if you obtain that information unintentionally. Now you have to be able to prove it’s unintentional if the question came up. A real experience example of this is if you work in an office building and your neighboring company, a public company, is being raided by the FBI. Can you use that information to take a position in the market? Yes, according to multiple attorneys we spoke with.

I bring this up because we assume the trading is coming from insiders but I wonder if the parties behind this have baked in a layer similar to my story above.

To close this back to your comment, and I don’t have an answer here: is knowing who the insiders are and acting on that a crime? If you did know and didn’t report them, are you breaking a law? Or worse, you reported it to the deaf ears of a regulator that are focused elsewhere or are under resourced to respond now?

3eb7988a1663•about 1 hour ago

How is there enough volume to cover the other side of the bet with these minutes-before trades?

georgemcbay•about 1 hour ago

For prediction markets you can find out who the insiders are for different categories over time, see for example:

https://x.com/peterjliu/status/2024901585806225723

But there is still the problem of knowing which new trades the insiders made before the bet is settled (maybe solved by being an insider of the prediction market), and also since prediction markets need money on both sides (you are betting against other people, not the 'house') when the insiders make their buy they probably eat up most of or all of the action on the other side.

bluecalm•33 minutes ago

Same goes for sport betting and yet here we are. People like to bet. They willingly bet on things they have guaranteed disadvantage on (casino games like roulette, slots etc.). People also drink pure poison (alcohol), smoke pure poison (cigarettes) and engage in brain dead activities like speeding and street racing.

Gambling should be judged as any other vice - people get something out of it (rush, hope, whatever) not by rational money allocation standards.

agumonkey•about 1 hour ago

considering the scale involved, and the OSINT trend, is it possible that people could monitor and correlate stuff like airplane, or us navy activity to deduce when to enter ?

nathancahill•about 1 hour ago

I saw a tweet about a trader placing an oil bet when they saw two military aircraft turn around on their way to Iran, via transponder. I believe before the deal was announced.

3eb7988a1663•about 1 hour ago

That also sounds easy enough to fake for some plausible deniability.

outlore•about 1 hour ago

There’s a recent Patrick Boyle video which puts it aptly: prediction markets are a wealth transfer from retail investors to trading algorithms and people with security clearances.

Anyway, one thing I don’t understand yet is how new markets are created. They aren’t user generated, so how did an “Iran strike” market exist to begin with?

reenorap•about 1 hour ago

Without them talking about how much people LOST, this entire article is meaningless. With the advent of 0DTE options which dominate options trading, the fact that the notional number of people who made money makes sense because so many more people have lost money.

jfrbfbreudh•about 1 hour ago

Yes, someone is on the other side of the losing trade, but how many people (not firms) do you know who write contracts for short term options?

I personally don’t know any, and I worked at one of the biggest HFT firms for a few years.

The losing side(s) of these positions are heavily hedged, and are happily making money on volume and volatility. (And making record profits this year)

watwut•about 1 hour ago

Of course they made money from other traders. But that is precisedly the issue with insider trading - you are taking money from more honest traders.

reactordev•about 1 hour ago

Prediction Markets require insider trading to function... how do people not know this? It's a setup from day one. If you have the knowledge, you're going to cash in, if you don't have the knowledge, you are throwing your money away.

firebot•about 1 hour ago

Most gamblers prescribe to the cost sunk fallacy and keep 'one more time'ing it to bankruptcy.

Math wins over your feels every time.

OutOfHere•about 1 hour ago

If you follow your math, such gambling losers don't really have that much money to bet on an ongoing basis. The ones who support the losing side on prediction markets are the ones who usually do fine, but sometimes are taken by surprise.

casey2•about 1 hour ago

Statcon 101: Gambling addicts take loans to gamble, those loans are sold to your pension fund. Who is the loser?

UncleMeat•about 1 hour ago

I've never seen an ad from either Kalshi or Polymarket that says "don't play if you aren't an insider."

jjav•about 1 hour ago

The game only works if they also have a lot of people losing money.

DANmode•about 1 hour ago

potentially, each time.

mrtksn•about 1 hour ago

I wonder if this means that in a true free market betting is actually impossible as extra-gaming structures like those spontaneously emerge.

You need centralized regulation to make it work.

mananaysiempre•about 1 hour ago

The standard argument for prediction markets does not include any kind of fairness in gambling. Rather, the point is precisely to surface insider or otherwise well-founded knowledge of the real odds so they can be available to anyone who wishes to look at the price.

(And I do not see how this first-order viewpoint is problematic, precisely. It’s the second-order consequences of people making the currently-considered-unlikely decision in order to cash in on a bet that I have an issue with.)

ck2•about 2 hours ago

What's the statute of limitations on such things?

Because it won't be prosecuted by 2029 but could be afterwards

Personally I think it's a bigger problem when the President sues his own government for billions and then orders them to pay it out

Because -that- is not an official act. It could be prosecuted but no-one will touch it even after 2029

cbg0•about 2 hours ago

Unless somebody snitches there's no real way to prosecute insider trading. You can say you just felt like making a trade, or that you read one of Trump's posts the moment he put it up on Truth Social and you just happened to have the trade ready to go.

Unless they're absolute morons, the people doing insider trading for large sums of money will have already built a strong alibi.

oa335•about 2 hours ago

> Unless they're absolute morons, the people doing insider trading for large sums of money will have already built a strong alibi.

My theory is they are banking on preemptive presidential pardons in Dec 2028.

Noaidi•about 1 hour ago

Trump already said he will do this.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-plans-to-pardo...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

ZeroGravitas•about 2 hours ago

In some nations just gambling on a war that your soldiers have died in would ruin people's careers and possibly their lives permanently as they are shunned by society.

In other nations you can illegally sell arms to Iran in order to illegally evade congress's attempts to stop you supplying money to terrorists, illegally shred evidence and lie to congress under oath about it all and get a job as a pundit on Fox News.

paulpauper•about 1 hour ago

you can say you just felt like making a trade, or that you read one of Trump's posts the moment he put it up on Truth Social and you just happened to have the trade ready to go.

An employee with access to Truth Social's backend can in theory do this by reading the tweets he's writing before he sends them.

ChrisArchitect•23 minutes ago

Traders place $760M bet on falling oil ahead of Hormuz announcement

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47812385

cineticdaffodil•about 2 hours ago

Now of cocourse there are bots circling watching for insider trades. Which you can "milk" by pretending to insider trade and then hedging a bet against them. A whole eco system of scoundrels

artificialprint•about 1 hour ago

You don't get it, you can make m o n e y with it, with which you can buy a yacht and an expensive car.

paulpauper•about 2 hours ago

and then spoofing. Creating fake trades to entice copycats.

wslh•about 1 hour ago

I would be careful about attributing all of this to ordinary insider trading. Another plausible explanation is that some activity could come from state linked or intelligence adjacent actors, where the goal is not only profit but also testing or exploiting prediction markets as an auxiliary information channel.

iambateman•about 1 hour ago

Occam would disagree.

OutOfHere•about 1 hour ago

The most Occam-safe explanation is not insider trading but actually hard work in analytics to rapidly surface intelligence from X and other alternative data sources.

echelon•about 2 hours ago

What value do prediction markets give to anyone not in the insider trading class?

I predict these will be banned when someone finally uses them as an "assassination market".

jamal-kumar•about 1 hour ago

Government leaders and political policy advisors, intelligence agencies, hedge funds & quants, and large corporations doing crowdsourced forecasting for sure. That's probably why they haven't just been made illegal - the very policy makers are utilizing the data streams from this to predict the near-future to a decent degree. Companies like Cultivate Labs [1] go into the maths of it all but if you prefer videos Hypermind has some good ones [2] - anyone thinking this is just some degenerate gambler thing and criticizing them on those terms likely has no idea that people are doing pretty serious quantitative analysis on these things, to which use I will leave to your imagination

[1] https://www.cultivatelabs.com/crowdsourced-forecasting-guide

[2] https://www.hypermind.com/master-class

SirMaster•about 2 hours ago

I thought the point of them is they are “truth machines” they give a financial incentive for the insider class to essentially share what they know.

The benefit to those outside the insider class are that we now have a better idea of the potential outcome.

dvt•about 1 hour ago

This is what their argument is, and personally I think it's a pretty good one. But the main issue is that retail is getting fleeced and lives are being destroyed by gambling, so non-professional investors should not be able to use it. Imo, the upside (some fisherman with insider knowledge betting on the Strait of Hormuz) doesn't outweight the downside (a large-scale societal gambling epidemic[1]).

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/inside-out-outside-i...

jamal-kumar•about 1 hour ago

I think it's worth noting that my bank lets me ruin my own life too if I want with their own trading platform

avaer•about 1 hour ago

What are they sharing that they know though? That someone's getting bombed in an hour? That the government is rampant with corruption?

The first seems arguably treasonous. And the latter seems directly supported and funded by these "prediction markets".

If the argument is that prediction markets are truth machines, their social function seems to be support crime on a massive scale and get away with it.

dvt•about 2 hours ago

Afaik, Polymarket removes predictions that break CFTC's regulations (this includes assassinations, etc., at least in the US). They basically provide no value unless you're an insider, but they do tend to be leading indicators so it might inform some decisions (like: should you keep your money in oil?) that could be contingent on Polymarket predictions.

paulpauper•about 2 hours ago

Anyone can profit from an information asymmetry or mispriced markets--not just insiders with connections. If you are willing do do enough research you can in theory gain such an advantage. This is what some hedge funds do.

dogtorwoof•about 2 hours ago

I would argue that the sole value of prediction markets is to make insider knowledge accessible to the general public, quicker than it normally would.

That’s why these platforms saying things like “we will roll out insider trading” is laughable.

operatingthetan•about 2 hours ago

>I would argue that their sole value is to make insider knowledge accessible quicker to the general public.

Is anyone using AI to track these audacious and large bets? Seems like you could actually do this to tell which ones are insider info and which are just stupid random bets?

OutOfHere•44 minutes ago

I would just count which side of the bet has more bets above the median bet size with a zero or near-zero bet history. Insiders are more likely to use throwaway accounts than are non-insiders. Spoofers may however deter such analysis. AI may not strictly be needed for analysis.

OutOfHere•about 1 hour ago

Just because an insider bets on something does not in any way make the bet obvious to onlookers until the event is materialized for all to see. There is absolutely no surfacing of intelligence here because big bets are on both sides, winning and losing.

hdhdhsjsbdh•about 2 hours ago

Yet more evidence of the rapid disassembly of the social contract and our collective ethics, aided of course by unregulated tech. If you work for – or are involved in the funding of – these unregulated gambling and insider trading platforms, you should be ashamed of yourself. Your greed and lack of concern for the health of the human world you live in is sickening. You can get bag after bag but it will never fill the void in your soul.

thot_experiment•about 2 hours ago

This applies to almost everyone working on SaaS; not in all cases, but the absolute majority work on SaaS means creating artificial scarcity in order to extract value from people. It is a fundamentally evil, antisocial, anti human thing to do. If you believe that is okay to restrict access to infinite resources to preserve the status quo you deserve the same place in hell as the people pushing gambling.

Don't create artificial scarcity. Don't play zero sum games.

shigawire•about 1 hour ago

> almost everyone working on SaaS; not in all cases, but the absolute majority work on SaaS means creating artificial scarcity in order to extract value from people.

Maybe this is just my lack of understanding in how most SaaS companies operate... But to me making software that people find valuable and charging them for that is not inherently immoral. Surely that is the majority of cases?

com2kid•about 1 hour ago

> This applies to almost everyone working on SaaS;

The original idea behind SaaS is to align the incentives of the customers and the software company.

Historically software companies made money on selling upgrades. This meant bug fixes were not a priority, and security fixes were something companies got shamed into doing.

SaaS fixes that incentive problem. With reliable ongoing revenue a company can keep software patched and updated and doesn't have to cram a bunch of new shiny marketable features in just to make a huge sale every 3 or 4 years, while engineers try and add whatever bug fixes they can after the shiny new features have been polished off.

It also means software companies don't have boom or bust cycles with hiring. Funding stays consistent, and so does staffing. It makes the financials much easier to manage. Companies used to hire a bunch of temp employees in the run up to a release.

Ongoing release cycles also led to better software engineering practices. More automated tests, reproducible builds, better version control systems, and a lot more things that we take for granted now days.

There are obvious downsides to SaaS as well, but the original idea was good.

cmwelsh•about 2 hours ago

I’ve never heard “intellectual property” phrased as “artificial scarcity” and it isn’t exactly wrong…

Noaidi•about 1 hour ago

> Don't create artificial scarcity.

Nah. You know what the answer is? Get to a mental and physical state where you need very little. Right now the only way to win is not to play.

throwaway132448•about 1 hour ago

This is pseudo-intellectual drivel. Creating value and then charging for it is not creating “artificial scarcity”, any more than doing nothing is creating “artificial scarcity” by absence of value. There was no “infinite resource” that just happened to exist before the work was put in to create it. And creating value is - almost by definition - completely orthogonal to zero sum games.

CPLX•about 1 hour ago

This is the only reasonable point of view to take on the widespread and obviously unethical outbreak of gambling platforms. The fact that it's downboated and towards the bottom is just a reflection of how far the discourse has fallen.

Granted, maybe I should be less surprised given the fact that this is all being posted on the promotional website of a technology-focused private equity fund, but it's disappointing nonetheless.

paulpauper•about 2 hours ago

Insider trading exists with stocks too. I mean, if there is a way for people to profit by bending the rules or information asymmetry, someone will find a way.

cyanydeez•about 2 hours ago

Isn't it more than the ability to manipulate global markets essentially means we're headed towards a global inflation crisis? No one with critical thinking skills believe Elon's valuations are a rational market concern.

But if they _are_ rational, eg, a zimbawean inflation nightmare, then if you're not trying to "escape the permanent underclass" then _you_ are the irrational person.

So ignoring all politics, we're really dealing with a zeitgeist of people who think wealth inequality is endless, and the only way to survive is to lobster bucket and YOLO every chance to gamble.

sieste•about 2 hours ago

Maybe a superhuman AI? /s

_the_inflator•31 minutes ago

Oh well this is so bad.

Perfectly timed - and I thought: minute? No, a day! Pretty precise and since there are time zone differences what context did they use?

A laughable article. How many was lost because others bet on another day?

Really. Such a joke. Perfectly timed - 100k…

It is part of the system by design that someone needs to warn while others not. All are looking into a crystal ball.

Someone got killed? OMG, how precise! I bet there are thousands of such bets running and not working because the person still lives.

Imagine how dumb this is: this isn’t a mafia hit job some streets further down the road - this is an operation that could also have failed.

And then? Would The Guardian be sorry about the loss as well, this time the money of the “poor” speculating soul? I doubt it.

It is a lottery. The fact that it is won again and again is simple statistics. That’s why in Germany it got adjusted to make it harder to win. In other words: more combinations need to be used. Previously more and more people joined the lottery and therefore the chance to hit the jackpot rose due to variety.

Really such a lousy article.

Hedge fonds - don’t make me mention them.

UK was famous during the 80th not only for the Guinness Book of Records with totally weird records but also the many bets that were possible on all the different events and outcomes in UK. You could bet on the dress the queen mom would wear on a given day, her hat - eccentric, quirky but bet is bet.

There was this one guy during World Cup 2016 when Germany beat Brazil 7:1. How did he know?! The chances! Conspiracy I bet - or according to the G perfect timing.

What a joke…