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  • Hacker News
  • I have concerns regarding insider trading (as I certainly do regarding the stock market), but Kalshi's statement seems straightforward: "If you want to ban profiting from the failure of clinical trials, you would start with the stock market, where the financial incentive for this type of profit is orders of magnitude larger,"

    I remember a time not too long ago when storm insurance was unavailable for large portions of the Gulf states. Horrible horrible people, betting on where hurricanes would make landfall, just horrible. /s

    Explain to me like I'm 10 years old: what's the difference between a mutual insurance company and people betting on an outcome?

    by m3047
  • > If you want to ban profiting from the failure of clinical trials, you would start with the stock market

    It's not really a winning argument to say "We should be allowed to make money doing this harmful thing because many other people are also making money in a very different way with a different set of risks and potential harms"

    by autoexec
  • For a mutual insurance company, everyone is betting that it's going to happen somewhere sometime, that's why they pay the premiums. There is also not "winning" and "losing", there is no particular event like a known game, and you only get paid to cover a loss. You could squint and say it's taking 100:1 odds (or whatever your coverage-to-premium ratio is), but you have the incentive to play since if an event happens TO YOU, you really LOSE, and if you don't take a bet you just don't take the bet.
    by quantified
  • Given how much pressure there is to rig results with these markets, I see this going well.
    by OsrsNeedsf2P
  • If the hundreds of millions of dollars attached to the outcome doesn’t already create that pressure, tens of thousands connected to the prediction market won’t matter.
    by alex43578
  • I can only imagine the company culture that enables and encourages creating gambling opportunities for this and the other troubling worldly events
    by verdverm
  • It's the same company culture you see everywhere. A desire to make money at all costs with zero concern for who gets hurt as long as it'll be profitable.
    by autoexec
  • Incredibly stupid this is allowed and will become an avenue for rampant insider trading by biotech employees.

    Look at the recent ChemoCentryx fraud where they settled for $35 million over misleading data and overstating results. This is going to encourage even more data manipulation.

    by randycupertino
  • > rampant insider trading by biotech employees

    It also provides a big incentive for sabotage.

    by OneLeggedCat