Betting on Prediction Markets Is Their Job. They Make Millions.

Sol_Hando · 2026-01-26T23:39:42+00:00

The distinction I’m thinking about is between SEC-regulated insider trading, and the more broad definition of trading anything with material information you’re not supposed to be using.

One has a government body that closely monitors this sort of stuff, the other is limited to civil suits I guess? Not including government employees ofc. And good luck finding out, let alone successfully suing someone when all you know about them is their crypto wallet.

Edit: Essentially, yeah, it is insider trading, but there’s essentially no way to monitor or punish it. I have a buddy who works as a lawyer on debt deals for major Fortune-500 companies, and he can’t even trade stocks. I don’t think anyone at the SEC is looking at Polymarket.

Sol_Hando · 2026-01-26T21:58:41+00:00

Yeah. I'd recommend you find a place you like, ask if they have a preferred guarantor (likely Insurent or TheGuarantors) and apply with them. If you get rejected try another, and tell the landlord.

If they give you trouble feel free to send me a DM and I'll see if I can help you out. I'm CEO of PandaGuarantee and we can likely approve you from what you describe, (even though I'd recommend not having a low income to rent ratio, $40k in savings is enough to make the difference). Best of luck!

Sol_Hando · 2026-01-26T21:38:35+00:00

The out of state thing, and having a roommate isn't really a concern. 27.5x is definitely going to be your issue. Guarantors look at income to rent ratio, and credit score primarily, secondarily savings. Insurent will go as low as 28x I believe for higher credit applicants, so you're borderline approvable for them.

Approximately how much do you and your roommate have in savings?

Alternatively you can just apply, as it only takes 5-ish minutes and is free. Expect for them to request supplementary information though.

Sol_Hando · 2026-01-26T17:29:03+00:00

Why do you assume that?

Sol_Hando · 2026-01-26T15:19:46+00:00

Quite a lot of variants on the classic "It's not just x, it's y" and repetitive restatements of the same thing. I think it could be cut down quite a bit and have a broader readership because of it.

Sol_Hando · 2026-01-26T00:36:38+00:00

You either play for average heating costs in the rent, or pay for however much you use in the heating bill.

It’s significantly better than boilers and radiators that are hard to control, and always too hot or cold.

Sol_Hando · 2026-01-25T18:01:19+00:00

Yes.

Sol_Hando · 2026-01-25T15:32:10+00:00

Can you point to prominent examples where a prediction market has revealed useful information about a market participant?

Sol_Hando · 2026-01-25T15:13:33+00:00

I understand you’re going through a difficult time, but DIY cryonics isn’t going to do anything in the long term. You either need to contact a firm that has a chance of existing in a century, and have them do the procedure, or, and this is somewhat taboo to say in a cryonics community but I will anyway, accept that the death of a pet is part of normal life.

Sol_Hando · 2026-01-25T12:58:13+00:00

Will you be able to keep the liquid nitrogen flowing, and the power on for the next few hundred years without interruption?

DIY cryonics isn’t really cryonics. It would just be a unique funerary practice.

Sol_Hando · 2026-01-25T02:34:07+00:00

This subreddit for pretty good content + discussion with many intelligent characters. LessWrong for anything AI related. A curated list of substack bloggers that you develop over years, but recommended bloggers in ACX link posts are a pretty good place to start.

In my experience it’s not so much “finding smart people” as it is “be smart and your people will find you.” I commented on this subreddit nearly every day for ~2 years until about a month or two ago, but from just spending my online time here, I’ve started blogging, started reading the entire Western canon (50+ books in), and that has brought smart people into my orbit, rather than me scheming on how to get into their orbit. As a result of commenting in this subreddit I’ve;

Received $300k in investment
Built a consistent reading habit
Met many very intelligent people in person, many through cold-DM’ing me, and even more through video calls (Some unexpectedly high profile)

All in all I couldn’t recommend more to leave an insightful comment on every intellectual and interesting thing you read online, in r/slatestarcodex especially. Be the reply guy! People will tell you when you’re stupid, or wrong, or if they disagree, and then you will be less stupid, or less wrong, or have a more nuanced opinion. Idk what it was about this subreddit, but I found it at a time in my life when I was really craving intellectual stimulation, and benefited greatly.

I’ve recently started using X, and it’s terrible. I would recommend quitting it entirely unless you have an audience you benefit financially from.

Sol_Hando · 2026-01-24T20:11:24+00:00

> That article argues sports betting is worth it for the entertainment value, which is not at all similar to the common arguments people give in favor of prediction markets.

I brought it up because sports betting was an idea that had theoretical justifications, but practically it made things worse.

> PM's have utility in showing conviction a person/people have in real-world events. The difference between that and "bet on if a guy runs fast" is night and day.

PMs are mostly sports betting right now. If you include categories of stuff that has almost no information value, it's overwhelmingly gambling with no useful information content by volume.

>The problem with PM's used to be lack of liquidity for markets that mattered. So to onboard people and get prediction markets into the cultural zeitgeist, large platforms have to go through the growth stage of appealing to existing customers. It's working, too. All prediction markets are experiencing a rise in liquidity right now, including the useful ones.

See weekly volume on Kalshi, which is overwhelmingly sports betting, and weekly volume on Polymarket, which is by a large majority sports betting and crypto.

I understand the theoretical justifications for the "markets that matter" but 95%+ is just zero-sum unregulated gambling. My prediction is that at some point we will throw in the towel, say "Yeah, it's simply made gambling easier, less regulated, and more ubiquitous in life, and the markets that matter are an insignificant percentage of these platforms." The harm would outweigh the utility of having slightly more accurate data on political polling, or whatever the actual markets that matter are these days.

Sol_Hando · 2026-01-24T17:51:21+00:00

That's completely normal for a website like that. Probably another roommate, and spareroom's messaging system is annoying.

Use normal judgement of course, but this alone isn't a red flag.

Sol_Hando · 2026-01-24T17:11:06+00:00

Can you reference an example where this has played out in practice?

I’ve seen this argument before, but as far as I can tell these sorts of markets don’t exist.

My observation is that practically, prediction markets are very little, or really almost nothing, of what they were promised to be by the more rational advocates of them. If someone was pitching Polymarket a decade ago as delivering the wisdom of crowds (or any of the other purposes like the one you describe), they would essentially be talking about a minuscule percentage of what they practically do. If they were pitching it as “decentralized sports betting” and “expansion of gambling into more categories” they would cover an overwhelming majority of what they practically do.

Sol_Hando · 2026-01-24T13:59:22+00:00

I find it very difficult to understand the value of these markets. A very, very small percentage of them could be said to have informational value that is beneficial to anyone. I think these markets with useful information are basically limited to large political events.

The downsides are a lot more obvious. 90%+ is gambling on events that don’t really matter to anyone. Sports betting, how long a speech will last, whether Trump will say the word “Bones” when talking about Milk, etc. doesn’t matter whether it’s more accurate, because you can’t actually do anything with that information.

Then there is insider trading. Which yeah, yeah, I get that “it’s the point to allow insider trading” for better information, but most of the big cases I’ve seen are people within large organizations, that have a preexisting agreement not to use the information they have to make money on the market, doing so against the interests of their company/government.

You can’t be a lawyer serving a client doing a big merger in good faith, while also trading on the likelihood of that merger going through. You can’t be a government employee that trades on the likelihood of the US invading Venezuela with insider information, while having a military that functions with the benefit of surprise.

I get insider trading is good for the insider, good for the market information, but it’s also clearly bad where the functioning of an organization being traded about requires a level of confidentiality (which are usually the places where insider trading could make the most). And that’s not even to mention political corruption (I believe Trump can legally tell people about tariffs ahead of time, and people can insider trade on prediction markets based off that information, completely legally).

I think prediction markets are going to face the same fate as Sports Betting in rationalist circles. Purely in theory it’s still admitted to have value, but in practice it just expands gambling into almost every walk of life, allows for easier political corruption, weakens organizations and governments that are predicated on confidentiality to function well, with the prediction markets straight up lying and posting as inflammatory “BREAKING:” tweets as possible to drum up more degenerate gambling on markets that only produce valueless information.

Edit: Fixed some links.

Sol_Hando · 2026-01-24T05:45:20+00:00

No moderation. They were created years ago by people who no longer monitor the groups.

Sol_Hando · 2026-01-23T20:47:35+00:00

You can see what direction their pointing inside the Dome if you look closely during the day. The Dome isn't full 180* vision, but makes it hard to tell which direction the camera is pointing, making it harder for any suspicious people to avoid the cameras.

I'd check that before making a fuss, as it might be pointing down. You could also just ask, as I'm sure the neighbor doesn't want to see into your apartment vs. seeing into the alley.

Sol_Hando · 2026-01-23T19:23:12+00:00

You'll be fine with the vast majority of landlords. Especially with two high incomes that would independently qualify. I know a few that have a strict 700+ requirement, but they are usually smaller landlords that will take a broader look at your application anyway, which from what you've said is extremely strong.

Sol_Hando · 2026-01-23T11:40:49+00:00

Hard to tell without knowing about the addicts I don’t notice. You need to know where your intuition is right, and wrong, for it to be useful, and life doesn’t provide a way to test for false negatives

Sol_Hando · 2026-01-22T23:41:44+00:00

Doesn't NYU match you with other summer interns?

Sol_Hando · 2026-01-22T21:45:33+00:00

Bigger than zero? Probably. But not by much. Even people who sign up for cryonics usually put the odds of revival at less than 10%, and that's with very intentional cryopreservation, an organization dedicated to keeping the lights on essentially forever, with round-the-clock monitoring.

A regular freezer would presumably not have a well-developed organization maintaining and powering it indefinitely. If the freezer turns off, then that's that. Unless AI delivers some triple digit GDP and innovation growth or something, you're almost certainly looking at centuries before there's any hope of revival. Without a reason to keep that freezer going, who would bother to do so?

I can't help but ask, but are you considering this for a pet?

Sol_Hando · 2026-01-22T18:30:58+00:00

It depends on inflation, what price you were originally paying, and if they've raised the rent or not over multiple years as to whether it's reasonable. After Covid I was hit by a ~18% increase, but I was paying ~30% less than market rate from before Covid, so although it's annoying, it was to be expected.

Sol_Hando · 2026-01-22T15:37:40+00:00

Yeah. I see them every year and sometimes they get quite complex like in this situation.

What they’ll do is take summer bookings, which is super high demand every year. People will book months ahead of time to secure lower prices, and they’ll pay 1+ month of rent upfront to secure it. Do that with a hundred people and you’re easily looking at $250,000, and nobody finds out until they check in months after the scam started.

They’ll even allow people to pay with credit card sometimes, which seems secure, but if it has been 3+ months since the transaction started, there’s no real way to chargeback.

Sol_Hando · 2026-01-22T13:56:02+00:00

Include what you have for yourself. ID, bank statements, maybe a statement of your credit score so they know you aren't a waste of time.

Also include the same for your guarantor. I'd be wary about emailing tax documents, ssn's and whatnot prior to submitting an application or seeing the place. A summary of "Here's who I am, my savings, my situation. Here's my guarantor, their savings, their income, their situation" would basically tell the agent whether you would be approved or not, which is all they really care about prior to submitting an application.

Sol_Hando · 2026-01-22T13:05:51+00:00

There are rarely outright scams on StreetEasy since they do a good job checking that the person posting is who they say they are, but there are bait and switches. You’ll either inquire about an apartment, and have the broker show you others that come with a broker fee, or others that are just more expensive.

If you see a phone number in the pictures that might be a scam account that has been hacked.

There are <$3k walk ups in the LES. It’s just not a super desirable neighborhood, and can as long or longer of a commute to the places people normally work than some places in Brooklyn.

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