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Today’s Indicator: >$400,000
Insider trading is a problem. So how do we stop it?
It’s a real profitable time to have access to privileged information. An American soldier allegedly used classified information to turn $33,000 into more than $400,000. But millions of dollars more have been made through eerily well-timed bets on prediction markets like Polymarket. For example, when the U.S. would bomb Iran, or capture Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro.
If you’re a Congressman with access to this kind of information, it seems illegal to bet on it, right?! It’s not so simple.
We looked at Polymarket specifically to understand why this is so hard to police. The difficulty comes in how the company is structured. It does have a U.S.-regulated front-end at home. But the REAL action happens on the back-end: a largely anonymous, crypto-based international platform. When big bets are made there, it’s harder to see who is actually doing the betting.
U.S. Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal doesn’t want prediction markets to have it both ways. SO! He introduced legislation to make them act more like regulated sportsbooks (FanDuel, DraftKings, and some other combined word with CapitalLetters). Hopefully, that would cut down on anonymity and reduce potential insider trading.
While anonymity is certainly easier with cryptocurrency, transactions are written into the blockchain and therefore permanent. We get into all that in the episode.
Rest of the Week
News We’re Watching
1. Is it POSSIBLE to meet this level of electricity demand?
What to know: The scale of new electricity demand is shocking (always pun intended). At a recent conference, an exec at Oncor, a large utility in Texas, said they’re getting SO many requests from customers (data centers being the prime example) that they’re forecasting 122 GW of demand on their system over the next five years. As of now, if you step on the gas of Texas’s primary grid, ERCOT, it can deliver 85 GW of power at most at one time. In other words, ONE UTILITY would need to increase the energy that Texas can currently offer by… ~143%.
Jon Wellinghoff, former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), describes the current demand as “off the charts.” He says the typical increase in power demand is less than 2% year-over-year. Not 143% over five years. Do the math on that one.
The story isn’t unique. Jon told us, “I just got off the phone with somebody in the El Paso area who said that there’s a 5-GW project in El Paso. All of El Paso is like 840 MW… so this is five times as big as the city itself.”
So, what’s a grid to do? Is it possible to add this much electricity to the grid? Jon said, “it would be extremely hard.” He explains there’s SOME slack within a grid. Maybe it could add 10 or even 20 percent more electricity, “but you’re certainly not looking at a 100+ percent increase.” Ultimately though, Jon just doesn’t think all this demand will come to fruition. The AI race is hyper crowded and everyone wants a piece of the power. But he says, “maybe as much as half of it may not get built ultimately because [of] a competitor who’s decided that they just can’t compete and that they weren’t quick enough to market and as such, they are no longer interested in building the facility.” Not to mention, local communities are not thrilled with data center construction. Developers have canceled at least 20 data centers in the first three months of this year due to local opposition.
2. Will more sleep lead to better grades?
What to know: In 2022, a law took effect in California that pushes back the start time for middle and high schools. Researchers wanted to know: what will that mean for mental health, sleep and academic performance! They found kids DID get more sleep overall, that boys (specifically) seemed to show meaningful mental health improvements, and many students saw math and English scores improve with the biggest gains among Hispanic and economically disadvantaged kids.
Why we care: A couple of us Indigators didn’t grow up in the U.S. and were shocked to learn how early schools start in the U.S. Pre-7:30 am!? What 14-year old runs on that kind of schedule?! Sometimes, you just need to pull a lever and things start to improve. Rather than throwing money at new educational approaches, turns out a school can just move back the start time and watch grades go up. Look at humans, solving these little puzzles. So nice.
Public high school average start time and percentage distribution of start times between 2017-2018.
U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS), “Public School Documentation Data File,” 2017–18
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U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS), “Public School Documentation Data File,” 2017–18
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