So they caught $4000 and $200. Sounds very much like sacrificial pieces.
“yes but see they don’t tolerate insider trading!”
That’s it? One from a social media post by the own person who did it, and another in a slim market and had tips come in?
So it basically comes down to:
1. Don brag about doing something, that I’m not quite sure is illegal but supposedly breaks kalshis terms of service (oh no)!
2. Instead of operating in a thin t̶r̶a̶d̶i̶n̶g̶, sorry, prediction market pool, stick with ones that enable more plausible deniability?
If anything there should be more regulation against prediction markets like Kalshi or even elimination.
But they ended up just being for gamblers and there is no more signal.
It does seem like there could be a distinction between markets which require genuinely knowledge and analysis (geopolitics), versus pure gambling (sports, crypto up/down 5 minutes, etc), but I'm not sure who's going to bother making it.
Insider, market manipulation, or…?
Also what is this 5x payment penalty? What mechanism do they have to enforce this?
https://closingline.substack.com/p/the-takeaway-kalshi-non-s...
sounds like a great cause
Or Axios yesterday (Kyle Langford + Artem Kaptur(Mr Beast Aid)) https://www.axios.com/2026/02/25/kalshi-insider-trading-susp...
There seems to be no prosocial reason for this whatsoever.
0. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/587993/why-betting-on-to...
Do you mean Australia or the Commonwealth of Nations?
Similarly, I love the idea of the casino aesthetic, but the entire setup is designed to fleece you and to exploit the addicted. It was better when you had to go to Vegas to experience such a thing, but now casinos are everywhere, diluting the entire thing and making it sad instead of glamorous. Maybe it always was....
I used to work in odds prediction and the issue is all the shady shit surrounding betting, not actual betting itself. We very contractually forbidden from betting on any of our customers, but managers would go around encouraging to bet. This is obviously a huge problem when you know how the algorithms work, and more importantly, where all the errors are. I'd see odds on matches where you couldn't lose on a weekly basis (think 2 outcomes, average payout of >2x), open bets for things in the past (score 1:0, bets for first point still open, etc.).
The biggest issue though, was betting houses straight up banning winners. The more you won, the less you could bet, eventually leading to a ban. This is straight up illegal, but nobody cares. On the flip side, the more you lost, the more you could bet, you'd get better rewards (if you won, which you didn't) and the cheaper it would be.
You can't ban gambling, because you'll just get illegal gambling (much like prohibition/drugs). Proper regulation and enforcement is the solution here (much like drugs).
Edit: All this being said, I don't bet, nor do I endorse gambling with real money. I agree betting should mostly be between you and your buddy, but unfortunately the reality doesn't support that.
If amount wagered, at typical takes for bookies/casinos/lotteries that would mean people would lose in expectation 0.1% to 5% of their income. Seems like a reasonable compromise that people could indulge in gambling for entertainment but very few people would be caused financial problems. With some weird second-order effects, but no regulation is perfect.
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.
A substantial portion of the other bets on the market are other trivial events of no financial significance. For instance, the second insider case described in the article involved the contents of Mr. Beast videos.
> For example, if you are a high level democrat party leader and you will lose your job if a republican wins...
This would probably constitute insider trading, as the party leader has a direct role in their party's election results.
on sports betting, people's income depends on if a team wins or looses. If the team didn't make it to the playoffs, then their bonuses (or income) is reduced. Sports betting enables these people to smooth out their income, instead of all or nothing.
I agree, these tools are frequently abused by gamblers (or better: the tools abuse gamblers), but unlike your typical casino game, there is utility in these services for certain groups of people.
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.
Every gas station in this traditional blue law state has beer and slot machines now!
Bring back Joe Camel!!
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.
By volume these markets only exist because of sports.
Having private platforms be judge, jury, and executioner doesn't seem right. Existing regulations ought to cover this no?
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...
Lol.
4 Stars. Go home and tell your mother you're brilliant.