Than in Polymarket and Kalshi only big brokers and insiders win It’s something we already knew. If anyone had any doubts, what happened with the White House teleprompter operator will surely dispel them all.
what has happened. As they say in the New York Timeseverything came to light in March when Kalshi detected unusual activity on the account of one of its users. It was not just any person, but it was Gabriel Pérez, a worker who was in charge of operating the teleprompter that Donald Trump used in his speeches from the White House. Pérez, who won $100,000, had been betting precisely on the words that the president would say and that he himself had put on his teleprompter.
Consequences. The first was that Kalshi froze the funds in the account and brought the case to the attention of the CFTC, the agency in charge of regulating the so-called “prediction markets.” According to the head of Kalshi’s regulatory compliance department, “We have filed charges against this person and have been cooperating with regulators on this matter, providing the evidence we have collected, as we do in any case.”
The second consequence is that Pérez has lost his job. The White House press secretary confirmed it in a press conference “This person will no longer be here. It was a decision by the president.” In addition, he added that Trump called it a “disgrace” and that they do not believe there are more employees doing something similar.
Privileged information. Since it is a regulated platform, Kalshi explicitly prohibits insider trading, but that hasn’t stopped more cases of insider trading from arising. insiders of the government and even the army. It happened with the capture of Maduro at the beginning of the year and later it has been known that up to three political candidates were betting on their own investiture. A few months ago, the White House itself sent a warning to its employees about this issue, but it has not stopped this operator either.
Where almost everyone loses. According to a massive analysis published by the Wall Street Journal In May of this year, 67% of all Polymarket profits are distributed among 0.1% of its users. At Kalshi they do not share data on the benefits of their users, but according to the company’s own data, there are 2.9 users who lose for every one who wins. And who are the ones who win? Mostly traders professionals and companies that have access to enormous data sets and very expensive. They use this information to train algorithms that can perform thousands of operations a day that would be impossible for a user to handle.
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