Where Prediction Markets Put $600 Million: Long Shots That Lost
Boosters like to describe prediction markets as barometers of public opinion, or even “truth machines” that offer a clearer picture of where things are headed. Volume, though, is a record of trading, not of foresight. Ars Technica reports that two global election markets on Polymarket's offshore platform generated over $600 million in trading volume — and that most of the activity was buying and selling contracts tied to long-shot candidates who ultimately did not win. A market can be extremely busy and still land on the wrong answer. That dollar figure measures how much people were willing to trade, not how well the crowd read the race; when the heaviest trading sits on candidates who never had a path, the number looks less like a forecast and more like an appetite.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
The interesting number isn't the $600 million. It's that so much of it sat on candidates who never had a chance.
Or the interesting number *is* the $600 million: that's a lot of people treating a long-shot ticket as worth holding, whatever it says about forecasting.