today was an interesting Ind vs Eng T20 World Cup Semi-Final match. what have recently become popular are prediction markets. markets that work like normal stock markets but where you trade on outcomes of events rather than shares of companies.

there are all kinds of events - from what the bi-monthly rbi decision on repo rates will be to who will win a sports match to how many tweets elon musk will post in a month.

as with stock markets, these markets are also susceptible to insider trading. the magic key in both these markets is information. if you have more information than the rest of the population, you can make money.

i was watching the polymarket prices and trying to find if there were ways to arbitrage. i realised during the last couple of overs, that one could earn money if they were sitting in the stadium - because broadcasting generally lags by 4-5 seconds.

and then i realised that people must be doing this. and so the prices should change realtime faster than what i could see on the TV. and so I opened the trade book.

the price of Eng winning share jumped - and I realised - there would be a boundary - and there it was 3 seconds later on the TV, a six.

not much change for couple of balls thereafter. and then a sudden dip - I knew before the TV could show me, that Eng lost a wicket. the batsman hit high, and if it weren’t for polymarket, i’d have thought that it was going for a six, but there he was - tilak verma, catching the ball just centimeters ahead of the boundary line.

searched about the broadcast lag and found an old article from 2013 saying that bookies were earning money by sending their people to the stadium who’d tell them what happened seconds ago than the broadcast.

so it turns out, atleast for now, that you can go to a cricket match, and earn enough money from prediction markets betting earlier than what other people can, and effectively watch the match from the stadium for free.