It's a big difference. There's vastly less chance someone manages to expose state secrets through their bets on oil futures. The volume is higher, and the prediction is less specific.

Yeah but less direct incentive than "If my friends (and I) bet money on X, and I do X, they (and I) make money."

Oil prices are affected by many other things too. It's valuable to isolate individual factors.

The idea is not economic hedging but gambling and corruption

Yeah we should ban derivatives too.

> Isnt this silly when you can calculate the chance of war in Iran by oil futures instead

This is why I'm opposed to prediction markets - they're gamified futures contracts (unsurprising given the founders at Kalshi are ex-Citadel and why Intercontinental Exchange executed growth equity rounds with Polymarket). A lot of degenerate gamblers are basically being taken to the cleaners as they lack the experience to actually mitigate risk or understand how to strucure futures contracts.

And an actual insider has much easier and much more legally defensible alternatives to conduct insider trading than using a platform that has KYC requirements.

Except this wasn't driven by Oil. It was driven by Israel.