I would say prediction markets are more dangerous since they don't claim its gambling while sports gambling is much more explicit (not that the industry is a saint by any means)
At a minimum, if it was going to be legal why could they not have restricted the advertising like we do with tobacco ads? At this point the sports broadcasts themselves are advertisements.
You do realise that countries other than the USA exist, right? The UK has had various forms of sports gambling legal for nearly 100 years and society hasn't crumbled and neither did sport.
They don't have much to say about Kalshi other than "unlike real mainstream journalism, there’s no accountability". Which isn't saying much, because nobody is claiming prediction markets are a type of journalism.
I really don’t understand how these markets survive a competent DOJ considering the rate they’re having to ban people for “insider trading”. Fully appreciate the Unions position here.
Most competent people at the DOJ have either been fired or left. And the current administration seems to love insider trading, so long as they can be the insiders doing the trading.
It lasts for now, it won’t survive when the political pendulum swings back. “Make hay grifting while the grifters shine.” is the current MO. “Temporary economic strip mining operation.”
Insider trading is legal in commodities markets. If I am engaged in a hedging transaction I am doing so because I know about risks that I want to offload, and the buyer does also. You don't come to commodities markets without information.
Hedging is not insider trading. Insider trading is trading based on material non-public information in breach of a duty or obtained through fraud. In that sense, it's more of a principal-agent problem.
Also -- hedging is generally not done based on material non-public information, but rather to guard against known risks. Joe the farmer sells a bunch of wheat futures when he plants his wheat, not because he thinks the price will go down, but rather because if it does he goes bankrupt and he'd prefer to accept a known rate-of-return now.
Just for context that’s not quite accurate. There certainly is a distinction in the rule versus securities markets, which I know is what you mean.
But it’s more accurate to say participants can trade on lawfully obtained material nonpublic information absent some independent duty not to use it, which is much narrower than saying insider trading is generally legal.
Exactly. Pit mine sees who's buying what and is worried copper will go down. Datacenter people see who's inking deals and are worried it's gonna go up. They both need to get big fancy loans from their bankers to execute their upcoming projects. The bankers won't like to see unbounded risk on their balance sheets. A futures contract exists to solve this problem.
Not that this excuses some of the absurd stuff that goes on on the online betting platforms...
Got really confused as why my granola bar company was signing a deal with the NYT and The Athletic, and why this was deemed so controversial, then I used Google and learned the difference between Kashi and Kalshi.
Someone tampered with the weather equipment at Charles de Gaulle airport for a Polymarket bet. This sort of thing is going to become so much more common going forward.
There was also a story about a reporter who wrote a story about a missile strike and people who had bet against a missile strike applied a lot of pressure, including death threats, on the reporter to change his story.
what happened with Bill Simmons bragging about using his daughter's boyfriend to place proxy bets for him on FanDuel (who Bill is partnered with) is endlessly entertaining
Trump Jr. just pumped 300 million into Polymarket and also has a stake in Kalshi so, i'm not sure who thinks the DOJ will really do anything. this is fentanyl on the phone but there will have to be a few examples like some low-levels House members or state senators alongside sports casualites
I find it really interesting that online sports betting, which has been a thing in my country for 15+ years and largely a non-issue, is suddenly a total shitshow once it gets legalised in the US. I feel like the US always takes things too far. I watch quite a few US sports and former athletes giving betting suggestions during broadcasts is absolutely insane. How can you go from being so restrictive to having absolutely no limits overnight? To make matters worse I get the feeling the TV companies here are taking pointers from their US colleagues and starting to force us down the same path.
Citizen's United was the nail in the coffin for honest journalism, because it sold out to those with the largest wallets. If you truly want truth in journalism support independent journalists financially, and with your attention. Ignore corporate media.
Unfortunately, this shows how much facts and reality have been turned into nothing more than a loyalty test by both sides of our political debate.
> A partnership between The Times (for The Athletic) and Kalshi would also provide validation that their prediction market data should be taken seriously as an indicator of the future. Facts prove otherwise.
They could have objected to the partnership on any number of valid grounds, like the fact that predicting the outcome of sporting events provides no valid benefit and can only ever be gambling, or that the integration is probably going to be pretty lame and provide no benefit to the reader.
Instead, they felt compelled to make a trivially false claim, the claim that prediction markets do not accurately predict the future. It's trivial to prove that this claim is false, because if it were true, it would be very easy for anyone to make a huge amount of money on prediction markets.
It's even more telling why they made this claim, to avoid "providing validation". Not because of any harms caused by sports gambling addiction, but because it could provide a tiny piece of political ammunition to a product that has been slotted into the opposing political tribe. Reading this statement, one gets the impression that they would be completely OK with sports gambling on The Athletic, as long as it was provided by a more traditional casino-style bookie operation.
I'm guessing that anyone in the room when this statement was written who even brought up the question of the facts could be safely sidelined and ostracized by the union as being insufficiently loyal to their political position.
> the claim that prediction markets do not accurately predict the future. It's trivial to prove that this claim is false, because if it were true, it would be very easy for anyone to make a huge amount of money on prediction markets
I'm not intimately familiar with prediction markets (I avoid gambling), but can you explain how this is the case? If the market unpredictably incorrect, then shouldn't it be difficult / impossible to predict precisely which bets will be wrong in a way that would allow you to profit from them?
Ultimately isn't it the case that all they're doing (at least from a prediction point of view) is aggregating (better or worse informed) guesses? Excepting outright corruption / insider trading of course. This might tell you a great deal about what the set of users of a given prediction market expect as an outcome for a given prediction, but it doesn't tell you anything about the future itself. Any more than the stock market (fails to) tell us to pull out money out the day before a crash.
In practical terms commercial prediction markets are unregulated gambling. That's where the money comes from. Stapling a vitamin C packet to your cigarette box doesn't diminish that you're selling cigarettes.
> Instead, they felt compelled to make a trivially false claim, the claim that prediction markets do not accurately predict the future. It's trivial to prove that this claim is false, because if it were true, it would be very easy for anyone to make a huge amount of money on prediction markets.
Isn’t that what’s actually happening though? Traders are making real money from bad predictions?
“These are the Sharps actually making money on prediction markets” Odd Lots podcast (Bloomberg) 2026 https://youtu.be/MFAnQpdgkZE
Your whole comment misses the point of the sport. It is not effective to look for the most accurate or rhetorically tested point, the goal is to rally as large a group around a point that dosent make them look like hypocrites, or materially clashes with how they present their identity in other parts of their lives.
Sports gambling is a cancer, as are prediction markets. None of it should've been legalized and all of it should be banned.
Prediction markets are a wonderful idea that at the moment is strongly lacking in prestige signals, bare minimum of regulation and liquidity.
I would say prediction markets are more dangerous since they don't claim its gambling while sports gambling is much more explicit (not that the industry is a saint by any means)
It's also an obvious and cynical regulatory dodge. Prediction markets make the bulk of their profit from sports betting.
At a minimum, if it was going to be legal why could they not have restricted the advertising like we do with tobacco ads? At this point the sports broadcasts themselves are advertisements.
have you seen stock market these days?
Is the stock market able to distinguish cancerous vs non-cancerous growth?
Yes. It feels more and more like a casino as time goes by.
You do realise that countries other than the USA exist, right? The UK has had various forms of sports gambling legal for nearly 100 years and society hasn't crumbled and neither did sport.
America is not the UK and its citizens are not capable of regulating themselves in the face of this sort of exploitation.
Imagine two siblings, one who can handle the freedom of choosing their own bedtime and one who cannot.
The linked article is pretty interesting:
> found a pattern of [Polymarket] sharing false and misleading information
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/20/technology/polymarket-soc...
They don't have much to say about Kalshi other than "unlike real mainstream journalism, there’s no accountability". Which isn't saying much, because nobody is claiming prediction markets are a type of journalism.
This website has been full of people that say it's better than journalism, so I don't think you're really capturing the entirety of the dynamic
Sports gambling is a cancer for every sports institution and this protest is a step in the right direction.
I really don’t understand how these markets survive a competent DOJ considering the rate they’re having to ban people for “insider trading”. Fully appreciate the Unions position here.
Most competent people at the DOJ have either been fired or left. And the current administration seems to love insider trading, so long as they can be the insiders doing the trading.
I'll leave this here, Donald Trump Jr got a free stake in Kalshi. https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/options/articles/donald-tr...
also known as a bribe
It lasts for now, it won’t survive when the political pendulum swings back. “Make hay grifting while the grifters shine.” is the current MO. “Temporary economic strip mining operation.”
"Gather ye rosebuds while ye may" comes to mind
https://news.kalshi.com/p/donald-trump-jr-strategic-advisor
> a competent DOJ
The question answers itself.
Insider trading is legal in commodities markets. If I am engaged in a hedging transaction I am doing so because I know about risks that I want to offload, and the buyer does also. You don't come to commodities markets without information.
Hedging is not insider trading. Insider trading is trading based on material non-public information in breach of a duty or obtained through fraud. In that sense, it's more of a principal-agent problem.
Also -- hedging is generally not done based on material non-public information, but rather to guard against known risks. Joe the farmer sells a bunch of wheat futures when he plants his wheat, not because he thinks the price will go down, but rather because if it does he goes bankrupt and he'd prefer to accept a known rate-of-return now.
Just for context that’s not quite accurate. There certainly is a distinction in the rule versus securities markets, which I know is what you mean.
But it’s more accurate to say participants can trade on lawfully obtained material nonpublic information absent some independent duty not to use it, which is much narrower than saying insider trading is generally legal.
Exactly. Pit mine sees who's buying what and is worried copper will go down. Datacenter people see who's inking deals and are worried it's gonna go up. They both need to get big fancy loans from their bankers to execute their upcoming projects. The bankers won't like to see unbounded risk on their balance sheets. A futures contract exists to solve this problem.
Not that this excuses some of the absurd stuff that goes on on the online betting platforms...
> competent DOJ
Answered your own question.
Corruption
Lobbying
CNN also has a Kalshi deal.
https://news.kalshi.com/p/kalshi-cnn-prediction-market-partn...
Got really confused as why my granola bar company was signing a deal with the NYT and The Athletic, and why this was deemed so controversial, then I used Google and learned the difference between Kashi and Kalshi.
This is about stopping a potential deal (https://frontofficesports.com/article/the-athletic-serious-t...), nothing finalized yet. They have allegedly abandoned the idea and claim that isn't because of the union demands: https://frontofficesports.com/article/new-york-times-union-k....
Someone tampered with the weather equipment at Charles de Gaulle airport for a Polymarket bet. This sort of thing is going to become so much more common going forward.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/23/hairdryer-or-l...
On another note, I had no idea the athletic was owned by NY Times.
There was also a story about a reporter who wrote a story about a missile strike and people who had bet against a missile strike applied a lot of pressure, including death threats, on the reporter to change his story.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/03/17/israel-...
what happened with Bill Simmons bragging about using his daughter's boyfriend to place proxy bets for him on FanDuel (who Bill is partnered with) is endlessly entertaining
Trump Jr. just pumped 300 million into Polymarket and also has a stake in Kalshi so, i'm not sure who thinks the DOJ will really do anything. this is fentanyl on the phone but there will have to be a few examples like some low-levels House members or state senators alongside sports casualites
I find it really interesting that online sports betting, which has been a thing in my country for 15+ years and largely a non-issue, is suddenly a total shitshow once it gets legalised in the US. I feel like the US always takes things too far. I watch quite a few US sports and former athletes giving betting suggestions during broadcasts is absolutely insane. How can you go from being so restrictive to having absolutely no limits overnight? To make matters worse I get the feeling the TV companies here are taking pointers from their US colleagues and starting to force us down the same path.
The only thing I know is that journalism stopped being independent and unbiased a long, long time ago.
Citizen's United was the nail in the coffin for honest journalism, because it sold out to those with the largest wallets. If you truly want truth in journalism support independent journalists financially, and with your attention. Ignore corporate media.
Interesting, but what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?
It seems like you should probably spend some effort on trying to learn at least a few more things?
Unfortunately, this shows how much facts and reality have been turned into nothing more than a loyalty test by both sides of our political debate.
> A partnership between The Times (for The Athletic) and Kalshi would also provide validation that their prediction market data should be taken seriously as an indicator of the future. Facts prove otherwise.
They could have objected to the partnership on any number of valid grounds, like the fact that predicting the outcome of sporting events provides no valid benefit and can only ever be gambling, or that the integration is probably going to be pretty lame and provide no benefit to the reader.
Instead, they felt compelled to make a trivially false claim, the claim that prediction markets do not accurately predict the future. It's trivial to prove that this claim is false, because if it were true, it would be very easy for anyone to make a huge amount of money on prediction markets.
It's even more telling why they made this claim, to avoid "providing validation". Not because of any harms caused by sports gambling addiction, but because it could provide a tiny piece of political ammunition to a product that has been slotted into the opposing political tribe. Reading this statement, one gets the impression that they would be completely OK with sports gambling on The Athletic, as long as it was provided by a more traditional casino-style bookie operation.
I'm guessing that anyone in the room when this statement was written who even brought up the question of the facts could be safely sidelined and ostracized by the union as being insufficiently loyal to their political position.
> the claim that prediction markets do not accurately predict the future. It's trivial to prove that this claim is false, because if it were true, it would be very easy for anyone to make a huge amount of money on prediction markets
I'm not intimately familiar with prediction markets (I avoid gambling), but can you explain how this is the case? If the market unpredictably incorrect, then shouldn't it be difficult / impossible to predict precisely which bets will be wrong in a way that would allow you to profit from them?
Ultimately isn't it the case that all they're doing (at least from a prediction point of view) is aggregating (better or worse informed) guesses? Excepting outright corruption / insider trading of course. This might tell you a great deal about what the set of users of a given prediction market expect as an outcome for a given prediction, but it doesn't tell you anything about the future itself. Any more than the stock market (fails to) tell us to pull out money out the day before a crash.
In practical terms commercial prediction markets are unregulated gambling. That's where the money comes from. Stapling a vitamin C packet to your cigarette box doesn't diminish that you're selling cigarettes.
Again, this union doesn't seem to take a position on gambling at all in this statement
> Instead, they felt compelled to make a trivially false claim, the claim that prediction markets do not accurately predict the future. It's trivial to prove that this claim is false, because if it were true, it would be very easy for anyone to make a huge amount of money on prediction markets.
Isn’t that what’s actually happening though? Traders are making real money from bad predictions?
“These are the Sharps actually making money on prediction markets” Odd Lots podcast (Bloomberg) 2026 https://youtu.be/MFAnQpdgkZE
Politics is the act of organizing people.
Your whole comment misses the point of the sport. It is not effective to look for the most accurate or rhetorically tested point, the goal is to rally as large a group around a point that dosent make them look like hypocrites, or materially clashes with how they present their identity in other parts of their lives.
This point being mealy mouthed is by design.