10/30/25
Note: The below represents my personal point of view, and is not an official opinion held by my employer, Tower Research, its affiliates, nor any of their private investments.
horses at the Epsom Derby --ar 3:2 --sref 1695613756
“If you want an intelligent answer you must ask an intelligent question.” -Goethe
“What is an expert anyways? Just some guy from out of town.” - Mark Twain
Did you know that you can bet on whether the pyramids of Giza have ancient underground power generators? (3% chance btw) Like the pyramids, prediction markets are both very old and yet vertiginously large today.
https://dune.com/queries/5753743/9335712
Growth like this is hard to ignore - prediction markets look to be doing close to the equivalent of 2024 election sized volume every week. Understandably, this has put a lot of investor attention not just on trading via these platforms, but on the platforms themselves. If you put on your ZIRP goggles the vision is pretty clear - markets on everything, hedge anything, financial truth machines, NYSE x 1,000,000. I am actually pretty bullish on Internet Capital Markets in general, but the narrative and hype seem to have diverged from reality in both direction and magnitude. I’ll highlight what the counter/arguments are for the core platforms being valuable, and what other areas I suspect are both valuable and under-explored.
Prediction markets touch a lot of what a firm like Tower does, so if you know someone working on a market, a prime broker, a clearinghouse, or anything else remotely interesting in the broader ecosystem I’d love to speak with them.