By The Editorial Board
Every time a politician takes the stage at a rally, or a football player runs out of the tunnel, they transform from a human being with unique experiences, thoughts and ideas into a percentage on a website that changes with every completed play or policy point made.
Sports betting and prediction markets take real people and events and turn them into numbers on a screen, dehumanizing them and turning them into vehicles for profit. The harms of sports betting are well documented and researched; you can’t step foot into a Las Vegas casino without seeing a “When the Fun Stops” brochure prominently displayed on an ATM.
Sports trading and prediction markets, on the other hand, do not have the same level of regulation. In most states, you only need to be 18 years old to sign up for an account on a trading platform like Kalshi or Polymarket. For more traditional gambling and sports betting, casinos require individuals to be 21 years old to participate.
These prediction markets also use different language than casinos to separate themselves from what is traditionally seen as gambling. For example, Kalshi, a popular trading site, uses financial terms to describe how its platforms work.
At a minimum, trading platforms should face restrictions similar to licensed and regulated sportsbooks to ensure fairness and reduce harm to consumers.
Kalshi categorizes ‘event contracts’ as “a new type of asset class that gives investors the ability to make trades on their opinions about a specific yes/no question. That’s why markets on Kalshi are structured as questions.”
Kalshi’s official website explains, “As an investor, you buy contracts based on whether you believe the answer to the market question will be YES or NO.”
Such a question might look like, “Are the Seattle Seahawks going to the Super Bowl?” In a traditional sportsbook or casino, you could place several kinds of bets to agree or disagree with that statement. But with Kalshi,you are simply betting on the result of an event in a yes or no format.
Even though the language used is different from traditional sportsbooks, the outcome is the same. Traders and gamblers alike still contribute money to a question and win or lose based on how that question is answered. While the mechanics may be different, the gambling-adjacent experience is still present. Changes in the wording used by trading platforms do not eliminate the potential harm they can cause.
“In addition to the monetary impact of gambling, an individual may also experience psychological and physical effects from gambling, which can include: Anxiety, Depression, Substance use, and Insomnia,” The American Addiction Center says.
Students are already operating at increasingly heightened levels of anxiety, and prediction markets don’t help reduce the strain. The easy-to-implement solution is to stop trading entirely; however, the real change comes from the regulatory bodies that control gambling and trading.
Trading markets produce similar effects to traditional gambling, so to create safeguards, must have similar regulations.
The risks of these trading markets have also reached the highest levels of athletics. The NFL has requested that trading and prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket stop creating easily manipulated bets to protect fans and players alike.
Regulators and gaming commissions should evaluate prediction markets based on what people using the platform are doing, not on the innocent or financial language the platforms use. Calling a “bet” a “trade” or eliminating terms like moneyline and parlay doesn’t mitigate harm done to the people betting or the people being bet on.
It’s simple to digitally fund an account or wager money on a question. That simplicity becomes dangerous when putting your mental health and finances on the line for athletics and elections.
