• The Cost of Pushing Markets
• Prediction Markets
• Buying Resolution
• Conclusion

You can manipulate financial markets, especially if you have enough access to capital. For the elite, manipulating markets is often as simple as asking a politician or CEO to say the right thing at the right time, paying for a tweet from an influential person or group of people. There’s lots of things that can influence financial markets.

You can also influence financial markets with your money, specifically US dollars - the shitcoin casino token of choice for the traditional financial markets. So the more dollars you have to put into financial markets, the more you can control the outcomes of those financial markets.

§The Cost of Pushing Markets

It costs a lot of money to fight the market, that is to say to fight truth and reality. The market will push back. However, you can push for a long time and hold back the market, for a price. True market signals can be temporarily masked with enough money.

This is well known. We see it every day. We see it when politicians hold enormous stock portfolios. We see it when those same politicians make certain financial moves right before announcements are made. This is the world we live in.

Today, these markets are being manipulated primarily for profit. The holders of these stocks or securities or commodities or whatever it is have one goal: to increase their wealth over time. They’re willing to take short-term financial pain for long-term financial gain, because they have the capital to withstand the storms. And they know that when the markets are down, that’s the right time to buy.

§Prediction Markets

Prediction markets are similar, but different in some ways that could get pretty dark. In prediction markets like Polymarket, Predyx or Kalshi, people are betting on the outcomes of real-world events, not speculating on stock prices.

Why does that distinction matter? Because there’s a question buried in it: Are you betting on the future, or are you paying for the future?

Defenders of prediction markets have an answer ready for this kind of worry. It goes something like this: sure, there’s insider trading, but that’s actually a feature. The theoretical good use of these things is that we get to spread information using them. If you’re an insider at a company and you know something’s about to happen, you start making asymmetric bets in the other direction. That skews the market. People notice. It becomes a signal of truth.

However, there are other reasons why asymmetric bets may be made; pump and dumps and other speculative financial trading practices have long been used to move markets one way or another. So when big bets are made from anonymous sources, is it signal, or is it deception?

§Buying Resolution

Stories are starting to come out of the prediction markets where, once enough money gets injected into a specific market, especially when the probabilities are very skewed in one direction, all of a sudden there’s a lot of money to be made. Find a real-world event priced at a 1% outcome, and you can make 100x your money if it happens to come true.

100x is not nothing. And if these markets get liquid and deep enough, the question becomes: 100x of what? 100:1 odds on a $100 bet is a lot different than 100:1 odds on a $1M bet, and at some point, the profit is worth more than the cost of going out into the real world and making the thing happen. When the cost of buying the outcome you need is less than your projected returns, financial incentives start kicking in.

And the stakes aren’t hypothetical, people are already putting money on the line for some scary stuff… deadly military actions, regime change or even nuclear detonations. If you are betting on someone’s death, it’s really just a sly roundabout way of making an assassination market.

Putting real-world events into financial markets gives the world’s elite a way to manipulate those outcomes with their money. When markets resolve in their favor, it may not always be in their financial favor, sometimes the event itself is more valuable than the money they lost to buy it.

§Conclusion

The world’s elite are experts at manipulating and profiting from traditional financial markets. Prediction markets let them use their capital for more than just number-go-up. Capital can now be deployed to make precision changes to the future. And who do you think those precision changes benefit? That’s what freaks me out about prediction markets.