l’ve been working hard (too hard) these past few weeks and I try to drop the intensity by listening to podcasts about politics on my buds. I’ve been struck by all the comments about how close the presidential race in the USA, because my private poll tells me it’s not

You don’t need to know a lot about spread betting to know that this is a big spread in a two horse race and the market’s been saying for some time that Trump is way ahead in the polls.

Then one of my friends (well Con Keating to be exact) sends me a link to an article on MSN from the independent

This sounded a conspiracy story to me.

Over the last three months, four accounts on a popular gambling site have placed thousands of bets totalling more than $50 million on Donald Trump winning the US presidential election next week. The bets, placed on prediction platform Polymarket, appear to have skewed the odds massively in Trump’s favour on the site, with the total figure representing roughly 2 per cent of all bets placed on the 2024 elections.

Had someone been buying influence on my blog? I’d been publishing these positive numbers for Trump and might I be an unwitting influencer?

The four accounts – Fredi9999, Theo4, PrincessCaro, and Michie – have been traced back to a single French national with “extensive trading experience and [a] financial services background”, according to a statement from Polymarket. The betting platform said there was no evidence that the trader had placed the bets to deliberately boost Trump’s odds, though the incident has proved how easy it is for one wealthy individual to manipulate the market.

Or was I just the innocent victim of market manipulation, my Betfair account losing me 65% of the cash-out value of my mighty £1  bet?

Was I both victim and perpetrator of a scam? As a result of my blog, were millions of unwitting Brits betting on Trump only for an evil French financier to be laying the bet for financial gain?

Or was this manipulation an attempt to dispirit democrats, or – conversely- lull republicans into not bothering to vote?

I decided to investigate further , coming across this article after typing some nonsense into google.

The latest figures from Polymarket give Trump a 66 per cent chance of beating Democratic rival Kamala Harris, who has just a one-in-three chance of taking the White House by these odds. Meanwhile, the latest national polling average compiled by FiveThirtyEight has a Trump victory at just 46.7 per cent and a Harris win at 48.1 per cent.

I have recently completed a long and tedious course in business ethics where I have learned how to spot market manipulation and that I must not tip fraudsters off , or keep it to myself but go and speak to my compliance officer about my suspicions.

My suspicions increased when I read the Fortune Magazine article

In separate investigations completed by the blockchain firms Chaos Labs and Inca Digital and shared exclusively with Fortune, analysts found that Polymarket activity exhibited signs of wash trading, a form of market manipulation where shares are bought and sold, often simultaneously and repeatedly, to create a false impression of volume and activity. Chaos Labs found that wash trading constituted around one-third of trading volume on Polymarket’s presidential market, while Inca Digital found that a “significant portion of the volume” on the market could be attributed to potential wash trading, according to its report.

This made no sense at all but sounded impressive as did the claims of Polymarket’s CEO

Still, with less than a week until Election Day, the suspicious activity on Polymarket raises questions about the accuracy of the site, which, its 26-year-old founder Shayne Coplan has touted, can “demystify the real-world events that matter most to you.”

I have to say, the appointment of Trump for a second term would matter a lot to me. My partner, who claims to be liberal in her views, thinks that Trump should win as it would make life “more fun”, more fun I guess unless you happen to be on the wrong end of his policies.

Polymarket claims to be more transparent as it sits on Ethereum making it less easy to manipulate.

Unlike competitors such as PredictIt and Kalshi, which recently prevailed in a lawsuit against the CFTC to operate in the U.S., Polymarket runs its platform on the Ethereum-based blockchain Polygon. Coplan says the crypto element offers greater visibility into its trading activity. “The beauty of Polymarket is it’s all peer-to-peer and transparent,” he recently posted on X.

Since the publication of the allegations of market manipulation, the predictor has changed and the delta between real-world and crypto predictions is narrowing, but not by that much.

 

My cash-out is now 2p up.

My take on this is that “money is the root of all evil”.