So-called “prediction market” opens up more gambling risks, but could be a useful if treated like a polling source says Chief Investment Strategist
Before Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was removed from power at the start of the year, an anonymous gambler placed a $30,000 bet on Polymarket that he would be removed from power by the end of January. The bet paid out over $400,000 USD once Maduro was removed.
Polymarket calls itself a “prediction market,” offering a platform for users to place bets on just about anything. A look at the front page of the platform on January 12th shows bets on the potential fall of the Iranian regime and its supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei, bets on NFL playoff games, and bets on whether Jerome Powell will be removed as Fed Chair or even criminally charged. The platform’s breadth is staggering and according to Philip Petursson, it represents both a risk to investors and a possibly promising source of data for asset managers.
Petursson is Chief Investment Strategist at IG Wealth Management. Despite all the ways Polymarket dresses itself up as a “prediction market” and uses financial language in its promotion, he sees the platform as little more than a broader version of FanDuel, BetMGM, or any other gambling platform. Participation on a platform like Polymarket, therefore, comes with similar risks that he believes advisors need to be aware of. At the same time, however, he and his team are currently discussing whether they should start using Polymarket as another input into their own asset management decision making, treating its menu of betting odds as a way of gauging public sentiment about events that might impact markets.
“You can take it as a live poll of personal opinions on various outcomes. It remains to be seen how valuable it is, but perhaps it's a better gauge than some traditional polls,” Petursson says. “We're starting to look at it. We're not using it in our investment decisions or inputs, but we are looking at it as a means of assessing what the general opinions out there are on various topics.”
Petursson notes some of what makes Polymarket compelling as a source, and some of what gives his team pause about it. For one, he notes that because the opinions it gauges are backed by real cash, they may have more conviction behind them than what someone tells a pollster over the phone. On the other hand, however, he’s unsure of who Polymarket is sampling from, with the risk that its participants skew heavily towards the overly online. The total volume of money bet on a subject, which Polymarket does publish, can be helpful, but there is still a lack of insight into who, exactly, are making these bets.
A snapshot of the Polymarket front page, taken Jan 12, 2026
While advisors and many news watching clients may start using Polymarket data as it becomes more mainstream, Petursson continues to sound a note of caution about actual participation in its bets. Along with the rising popularity of sports betting and day trading, Petursson observes a blurring of the lines between gambling, trading, and investing – at least in the way ordinary people understand those terms. People may see an investment in a stock as making a bet on an outcome, but Petursson notes that unlike a real bet on a platform like Polymarket, there is a far lower chance that an investment will suddenly be worth nothing should that outcome not occur. In reasserting the distinction between those categories Petursson notes a simple truth: an investment represents ownership of an asset, a bet does not. One can retain value, the other can’t.
For all the risks that come to users of Polymarket for bets, Petursson still sees potential utility that could come from integrating its polls into an analysis and decision-making framework. He notes that some of the opinions and likelihoods offered by Polymarket can be a useful way to break out of any individual’s particular media bubble and give an insight into the issues that other people are thinking about. It’s a way to raise important questions about potential outcomes, even if it’s an imperfect source of answers to those questions.
Speaking for his own team, Petursson says they’re still in the earliest stages of considering Polymarket as an input into their research. The next stages, he says, might be to assess its predictive capacity against other more traditional models, for example, the Atlanta Fed’s GDP forecasts. He notes that as technology marches forward, these more oblique sources of data could prove themselves to be advantageous, if treated appropriately.
“We could work it into our models to see what the aggregate of Polymarket is saying and what efficiencies come with that. That could lead into interest rate positions, or positions in different global markets,” Petursson says. “We’re not there yet, but from the data nerd side of things it could be really interesting to integrate down the road, especially with the use of AI where I could just run a script and have the AI pull the Polymarket data for me. It’s going to be an evolution, but I think it could reach beyond its intended use as a gambling site to becoming a survey site. As a survey site, it could become valuable to people like me, if the efficiency is there.”
