Adam Iscoe at the New York Times:
The joke among young men these days is that everybody’s got a little money riding on something: football games, foreign elections, the odds of a U.S. military strike. Except it’s not really a joke. I recently made $3.79 guessing when the United States would attack Tehran. I pocketed $0.85 when To Lam was re-elected general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam. I took home $83.64 after the rock climber Alex Honnold successfully climbed the skyscraper Taipei 101 without a rope.
My wagers were all placed on a prediction market site called Polymarket. Polymarket is sort of like the Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange, except instead of buying and selling shares of publicly traded companies like Apple or Microsoft, the platform allows you to trade on what will happen in the future. Who will win the midterms? How much will the Fed cut rates next month? Will the government shut down? Well, it did — and I lost an entire month’s rent. That one really hurt.
More here.
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