Comment Text:
The CFTC should not shut down PredictIt. Prediction markets serve a valuable purpose aggregating information and beliefs of market participants, which gets distilled into a price representing the market's best estimate of the probability an event will take place. These provide a useful quantitative source of data for all sorts of interested parties, including researchers. They also provide people a way to (at a small scale) hedge against future negative events.
It is, frankly, an absolute farce to see the argument that this represents mere gambling, or that that would be a reason to shut it down, when we live in a world of omnipresent online sports gambling. I can't watch professional sports, or even college sports, without being bombarded by sleazy ads for online sports gambling portals, now even being hawked by the announcers themselves and onscreen graphics in the middle of games. It beggars belief that the federal government would be wasting resources trying to squelch this tiny, pro-social prediction market at the same time it lets actual sports gambling balloon into a monstrous, multibillion-dollar industry working harder than the cigarette industry to addict a new generation.
Don't double down on your mistake. Stop trying to kill prediction markets. They are good. Shutting them down is bad.
