Insider trading is illegal – in securities trading and regulated sports betting.  But it is actually one of the advantages that futures markets have over more conventional predictors. 

If you want to know what is going to happen, give the opportunity to make big bets to the men and women who are going to make it happen.  It is ethically repulsive and probably violates the terms and conditions of Kalshi, Polymarket and other prediction markets, but it appears that insiders opened accounts and made tens of millions of dollars betting on air strikes, hours before the Trump Administration most recent bombing of Iran. 

Knowing the outcome before you make a bet might be distasteful, but relatively harmless greed, when you’re talking about who will win Oscars for best movie, best actor, etc.  Nevada regulators prohibit its state-licensed sports books from taking bets on the Academy Awards, because they know someone puts the names in those envelopes that are opened during the TV show.  Kalshi and Polymarket allow such bets, and there does appear to be some suspicious increase in the dollars going into contracts for the eventual winners, hours before those winners are officially revealed.  (Kalshi recently announced its first two public enforcement actions against insider trading.  An editor of YouTube star MrBeast allegedly used his knowledge of unaired show content to place bets.)

But betting on a war you are about to start is a whole different level of heartless corruption.  Congress blocked the Pentagon from creating a futures market on assassinations and other terrorist events.  If such a market had existed, Hamas insiders could have bet on an invasion of Israel on October 7th.

Of course, everyone knew that Donald Trump might start a war with Iran, at the very least to create a distraction from the Epstein files.  Even someone without inside information could see that Trump was desperate to take attention away from his name appearing tens of thousands of times in the convicted pedophile sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s correspondence.  It was predictable that Trump would start a war somewhere, after it was reported that Trump’s Department of Justice failed to disclose three separate FBI interviews of a woman who accused Trump of sexually and physically abusing her when she was 14 years old; and redacted his name in the fourth interview, which the FBI did release.

Polymarket saw $529 million traded on contracts tied to the timing of the airstrikes on Iran. That can be explained away as betting on Trump starting an “Epstein War.”  But at least six accounts were created in late February and the only trades they placed were on the date the air strikes would begin.  By far, the most money was put on February 28, sometimes for as little as ten cents to win one dollar per contract.  Whoever made these bets mere hours before the missiles were launched made millions of dollars in blood-soaked profits.

Polymarket also saw unusual betting on whether Ali Khamenei would no longer be supreme leader of Iran by the end of March. Before February 28th was over, Trump announced that Khamenei had been killed.  Usually, these types of contracts are voided if the subject dies; not this time.  Assassination by bombing was not a disqualifying event. 

Maybe this was not insiders making a buck off of the deaths of civilians, Iranian Islamists, and U.S. service men and women.  Launching a war involves thousands of people.  Maybe the successful bets on the timing of the “Epstein War” were the result of leaks.  That, of course, would create a separate problem; whether America’s foreign enemies can know in advance when they are going to be attacked.

Polymarket has defended taking bets on events in the Mideast, hyperbolically reported as “bets on World War III.”  “The promise of prediction markets is to harness the wisdom of the crowd to create accurate, unbiased forecasts for the most important events to society.”  This is true.

But do such bets give unscrupulous leaders additional incentives to cause more human suffering?  The framers of the U.S. Constitution intentionally gave the power to declare war only to the U.S. Congress, not the President.  They knew that an individual who has the power to start wars will do so.  Wars make money for arms manufacturers and usually glory, at first, for military commanders. 

I have one prediction myself: Donald Trump has been following the playbook of authoritarians to the letter; with one exception.  “Dear Leaders” give themselves medals and they wear military uniforms.  Nixon came close when he decked out the White House guards like 19th century musketeers, with white double-breasted tunics with gold ceremonial shoulder braids and thin-brimmed firm peaked front shako hats.  The costumes were eventually repurposed as high school band uniforms.

Wanna bet that Donald Trump takes the opportunity as Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces to don a military uniform?  Or perhaps he awards himself a medal?  

But we might have to wait until the FBI finds those interviews of Trump’s adolescent accuser.