Insiders Are Cashing In on Prediction Markets
The Journal.
The Wall Street Journal
4.2 • 5.8K Ratings
🗓️ 17 February 2026
⏱️ 23 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Shortly before the Super Bowl, someone went on Polymarket, that site where you can bet on |
| 0:10.3 | everything from sports to politics to the weather and placed 19 very specific bets. |
| 0:17.1 | I sat down with our colleague Kieland Ostrrov to take a look at that person's account. |
| 0:21.9 | All the trades on polymarket are public, but users can be anonymous. |
| 0:27.8 | I want you to just walk us through what we're looking at here. |
| 0:30.6 | This is the guy who's the Super Bowl guy. |
| 0:34.9 | Yeah, so this page is the page of someone who bet very, very well on who would be performing |
| 0:43.0 | at the Super Bowl halftime show. |
| 0:46.3 | The person bet around $19,000 that Lady Gaga would have a surprise performance. |
| 0:51.4 | They bet $3,000 that Cardi B would, too. They bet $10,000 that Travis Scott would not |
| 0:57.1 | perform. And they bet $200 that the headliner, Bad Bunny, would open with the song Titi |
| 1:02.9 | Me Pregunto. And 17 of those 19 bets were correct. The person won almost $17,000. |
| 1:12.6 | Yeah, and scroll up, because I'm curious at one more thing. |
| 1:15.5 | So this shows that the first trades that they made were right before the Super Bowl. |
| 1:20.1 | So they had not traded on anything before this. |
| 1:22.9 | And if you scroll down, you'll notice that there's no other trades after the Super Bowl ones. |
| 1:27.6 | So there's no other types of markets that they've traded on. |
| 1:30.9 | So based on what you are seeing here on this person's account, what can you deduce about what's |
| 1:36.4 | going on here? |
| 1:37.9 | So they are either a really, really lucky trader or they knew something ahead of time. |
| 1:50.2 | As prediction markets explode in popularity, bets like these, from people who appear to have |
| 1:56.1 | inside information are getting a lot of attention and raising a lot of eyebrows. |
... |
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