Forecasting newsletter #6/2025: Manifold structured debt, Manifest soon & ongoing Kalshi lawfare
and /r/forecasting subreddit resuscitated
Highlights
Manifold ~replays 2008 crash with fake money
Manifest conference happening this Friday, catch me there!
CFTC drops appeal against Kalshi
Prediction markets and forecasting platforms
Manifold
I blinked, and the users at Manifold rebuilt structured loans and replayed the 2008 crash (1 (a) , 2 (a) , 3 (a), 4 (a), 5, 6 (a)). This is just catnip for me man.
I thought that Ben S’s “we are confident that we are hopeful that this matter can be resolved” (link #6, selected comment, takes a bit to load) was a particularly cheeky turn of phrase. The matter started when a user noticed that prediction markets have a very hard time going close to 100%, even for markets that are a sure thing. He then proceded to learn why that is the case by borrowing a lot of play-money from other users and from the platform itself, which he then lost on betting on Biden, on Kamala, and then on Canadian conservatives. He attempted to wipe his debt clean by getting a wrong resolution for the Canadian elections and then quickly repaying his debt, but his transfers were soon undone, and he ended in a -5M hole.
Paul Christiano gave a throrough operationalization of how to resolve whether “AI get gold on any International Math Olympiad by the end of 2025”
Polymarket
Polymarket had an “Open Builders Program”, whose winners were PolyFund (a), Adjacent News (a), and Nevua Markets (a). The finalists were PredictFolio (a), Polynoob (a), Polynance, Oddschad (a). And the semifinalists are here.
Surprisingly, Polymarket gave Robert Francist Prevost only a 0.3% (a) chance of becoming the next pope only minutes before he actually became pope.
The Half Kelly podcast interviewed (a) Domahhh. Here (a) is an AI-generated transcript. And Domahh writes about winning $100K predicting the pope (a).
Kalshi
Kalshi announced (a) partnering with xAI, but soon pulled the announcement. The X account clarified (a):
Recent speculation about xAI’s involvement in the prediction market space has been circulating. While we’re enthusiastic about the potential of this industry and engaged in various discussions, no formal partnerships have been confirmed to date. Stay tuned!
Kalshi wants (a) prediction markets at 401(k) providers. Seems like a terrible idea, given that 401(k) are retirement funds. Kalshi also added support for Solana.
Gambling
Here (a) is a look at prediction markets from the perspective of Robinhood. It sees them as a tie-in into other products.
FanDuel/Paddy Power/Betfair parent company discusses (a) launching prediction markets. In general, prediction contract talk continues to swirl (a) among established sports betting operators, and some are trying (a) weird things like having hybrid state and CFTC-registered status.
Others
Limitless (a) is a new prediction market with a clean user interface that makes me think it seems fairly legit. True Markets (a) raises $11 million and launches new Solana-focused crypto trading app
A startup raised (a) $25 million for AI tool to forecast drug toxicity
Interactive Brokers expands (a) access to prediction markets with nearly 24/6 trading
A Twitter account, @pope_predictor, which was ranking pope candidates at least ordinally, did do well (a), though it’s unclear to me how to translate his numbers to probabilities.
Bridgewater has a kind of weird forecasting competition (a) with an organization called “Global Citizen” I hadn’t heard about. It reminds me of this tournament with Metaculus (a).
I had a great talk with @benzheren (a) on forecasting and prediction markets in China. The market is huge, and Chinese people definitely love gambling as much as Australians, but they don’t talk about it. Polymarket is big in China and Japan, particularly after giving good forecasts on the 2024 US election, but it’s referred to as an “illegal gambling website”. He’s interested in cultivating the forecasting and prediction markets community in China; if this is of interest to you maybe reach out.
Research and articles
A paper (a) looks at pitfalls in evaluating language model forecasters: temporal leakage and difficulty in extrapolating from evaluation performance to real-world forecasting (since top scores could come from benchmark hacking)
My friend Raymond wrote Gradual Disempowerment: Concrete Research Projects (a), some of which might be of interest to readers.
Odds and ends
I’ve revived the r/forecasting (a) subreddit. Here (a) is an open thread for the summer (though you reader are also welcome to comment on this newsletter with random forecasting stuff as well). Would love to see a few people join!
Brier.fyi (a) compares different platforms. Manifold is worse than other platforms in case where other platforms have the same question (e.g., a real money market on Polymarket or on Kalshi will tend to be more accurate). But Manifold is still calibrated, and has more markets, so I feel that the connotation of giving it a D feels wrong. I agree that Manifold is going to be worse than a liquid Polymarket, but Manifold will often have / allow me to create other markets (e.g., this one (a)), and what I want to know is whether these will be good enough to give me a sense.
Internal CIA prediction markets are no more (a), but lasted for at least a decade (a), which much longer than previously reported, says Robin Hanson.
Two case studies for forecasting at Amtrak (a) (JP Morgan) and Deutsche Bahn (a) (AWS) give a sense of how very corporate, very large-scale use of forecasting at scale looks like
An article on construction forecasting, advertising (a) this product (a). Doing forecasting for [boring industry] has to be enormously profitable.
I launched askaforecaster.com (a) to democratize access to elite forecasters. You can ask a question for $20-$1K.
A look at the Ukranian army introducing kill markets (a) to better allocate ressources across different units. Seems like a good idea to me.
Dynomight on Datasets that change the odds you exist (a), and Asterisk Magazine on The Mortality Impacts of USAID Cuts (a).
Sentinel continued producing a weekly roundup of global risks: #22: Ukraine drones destroy 41 Russian planes, proposed taxes on foreign investment, uranium enrichment continues in Iran, #21: Iran nuclear talks survive, Claude 4 release, trade tensions reignite, #20: US credit rating downgraded, $1T in Gulf state investments in the US, Kurdistan Workers’ Party disbanded, #19: India/Pakistan ceasefire, US/China tariffs deal & OpenAI nonprofit control. We also produced podcasts looking at The Risk of Nuclear War Between India and Pakistan and Endgames and escalations of the US and Japan's expensive debt problem, as well as an interview with a top geopolitical forecaster, Scott Eastman. We’re currently bottlenecked on distribution: consider signing up and sharing with your network.
News
World’s largest betting site puts Lee Jae-myung’s election odds at 90 percent, says The Korean Times (a). CNN is featuring (a) Polymarket somewhat regularly. These articles and mentions are now so common as to be unremarkable.
Fact-checkers forecast which dodgy (a) claims will do most damage.
Beyond Meat withdraws annual forecasts as US faux meat demand slides
How does (a) Switzerland predict landslides? A village was destroyed but the Swiss saw it comming and evacuated people beforehand.
Lawfare
Brian Quintez, formerly a board member at Kalshi, is Trump’s nominee (a) as CFTC chair. Here is his ethics agreement before joining government, and here (a) is an article going over his crypto & other holdings.
The CFTC dropped (a) its appeal against Kalshi (primary source (a)), and Arizona hit (a) Kalshi with cease-and-desist order. The Indians (a) are also trying to stop Kalshi, but not succeeding. Here is some inside baseball (a) on how Kalshi could lose in the courts.
The legal fight continues for “opinion trading” apps in India, like Probo (a); modelled (a) after Kalshi.
Draftkings faces (a) class action lawsuit over claims it exploits gambling addicts.
Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully or write poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.