30s Summary

A French trader, experienced in finance, anonymously placed $28 million on Donald Trump winning the US 2024 Presidential elections. The bets were made across four accounts on Polymarket. Critics opine that traders speculate without much evidence, while supporters of market predictions argue that the economic stakes make them realistic. Polymarket’s investigation found no foul play, noting that the individual spread the bet over smaller positions to avoid shocking the market. The company’s odds align with other platforms and reflect a surge for Trump over Harris that began in early October.

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Polymarket has found out who put $28 million on Trump winning the election – and it’s an unnamed French guy with a lot of experience in finance and trading. According to The New York Times DealBook, the company found out he was using four different accounts, labeled Fredi9999, Theo4, PrincessCaro, and Michie.

The company said that there was no funny business with the market during their investigation. They also noted that this mystery trader specifically spread out his bets among smaller positions so that he wouldn’t cause a sudden shock in the market.

When Polymarket reached out to him, he said his bets were due to his personal feelings about the 2024 United States Presidential election results. For now, Polymarket says that the election odds on their site match up with those on other platforms.

Back in October, Polymarket’s bet odds for the presidential election started leaning pretty heavily towards Trump, which had a lot of people worried that someone was messing with the market. This led to Polymarket looking into the matter and checking whether there were any US users on their platform at all.

However, the founder of a company called Kalshi, Tarek Mansour, said that the Polymarket odds were naturally occurring and accurately showed the general sentiment of the people. He showed similar data from his own company, Kalshi, which supported the election odds from Polymarket that showed Trump having a good lead over Harris.

Interestingly, Trump’s odds on Polymarket rose sharply in early October after having been pretty close between him and Harris for a while. In August, Harris was leading by up to 10%. But that lead started slipping towards the end of August and beginning of September, making it a pretty tight race from that point on.

There are some critics of Polymarket who argue that traditional polls are more accurate because they claim traders are simply making speculative bets without a lot of proof. On the other hand, supporters say that prediction markets like this give a more true-to-life sentiment of the election because there’s money on the line.

Source: Cointelegraph