"Predictive Markets," My Hairy White Flabby Ass!

Polymarket decided that it would be a keen idea to make book on the possibility of nuclear weapons use in Iran.

Once the news got out, people were horrified, and they backed down.

The crypto-based prediction sensation Polymarket has quietly taken down a bet on whether a nuclear weapon would be detonated before next year.

The bet, which was first listed last November, generated significant controversy on social media Tuesday after it was flagged by several users. 

Polymarket had also highlighted the bet on its official X account that day, tweeting that its market now predicted there was a 22 percent chance a nuclear weapon would be detonated this year. The post has since been deleted — and the bet itself has now been “archived” as of Wednesday morning.

………

The Wall Street Journal reported that the nuclear detonation bet had spiked in popularity after the US and Israel’s deadly strikes in Iran. Before the attacks broke out, only $10,000 in bets had been placed on Friday, according to data from the Block cited by the newspaper. But on Tuesday, the daily trading volume had surged to almost $244,000, bringing the total amount of money on the line to over $830,000.

Anyone want to take a bet on whether senior executives at Polymarket will eventually be frog-marched out of their offices in handcuffs. (My bet is never)

Investment Advice

It appears that there is a way to make money on the Polymarket "Futures Market" (Casino) by monetizing stupidity.

If when Elon Musk makes a pronouncement you bet against it, you always find a pathetic Musk fanboi willing to take the other side of the bet.

It's kind of like Jim Kramer.  If you bet against him, you win.

Tesla CEO and billionaire Elon Musk has long garnered a reputation for being massively wrong in his promises and predictions about the future.

In 2024, for instance, he said that AI would become “smarter than the smartest human” by 2025. He said his company’s SpaceX Starship rocket, which is still exploding during test flights, will land on Mars this year. Like clockwork, he’s predicted that self-driving cars will become a reality “next year” every year for well over a decade now. He promised robotaxis without human safety monitors by mid-2025, which the company still has yet to accomplish.

We could go on and on. In short, it’d be far easier to count the occasions on which he’s been right than when he’s been wrong.

Now, as NBC News reports, users on online prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket are making big bucks off of Musk’s astonishing track record for being wrong about the future. Case in point, Polymarket user David Bensoussan made a ten percent return after betting $10,000 that Musk wouldn’t follow through on his threat of forming a new political party following his falling out with president Donald Trump.

He also successfully bet against Musk’s prediction that Tesla would launch an “unsupervised” version of its erroneously-named “Full Self-Driving” software by the end of 2025.

To Bensoussan, it’s a matter of principle.

“He does have a solid fan base, and so if I can help separate them from some of their money, I’m always happy to do that,” he told NBC. “He has a habit of exaggerating timelines, and of saying he’s going to do these amazing things and attaching more immediacy than what his intent may necessarily be.”

I don't do these sort of markets, but betting that the lying liar will lie does seem to me to be a winning strategy.