James Wester

Read more here: rstreet.org/commentary/predi…

An individual earning $200k is around the 95th percentile and a household earning $200k is around the 85th percentile. Yes, cost of living varies, but that is nonetheless a high income.

Is there a pompous Latin phrase for, "Well, that's inconvenient?" I have been pretty critical of Kalshi and the broader effort to dress up event wagering (i.e. "gambling") in the language of investing and capital markets. I continue to find much of that argument gross. But Kalshi's election results, particularly its comparisons against traditional forecasting models, are pretty...compelling. I've acknowledged before that prediction markets might produce useful information, and here is some evidence that they do. So let me state here for future gotchas: If Kalshi produces publicly useful information through the trading of event contracts, that information can have economic value beyond the transactions themselves. And if those prices help people make better decisions, there's a genuine economic contribution worth examining. Now, back to me lecturing you degens: I still have serious objections to how these products are characterized and sold. I think much of the rhetoric around risk management and investing remains intellectually troubling if not downright dishonest. (Wagering on event contracts is not an investment thesis.) But I have to give the underlying mechanism more credit. Darn. (One thing I will also note for future posts is the future influence of prediction-market prices in news coverage, policymaking and commercial decisions, and how that may create greater incentives to manipulate those signals. How much of this is just the relative newness of these markets as signals? We should probably understand their susceptibility to concentrated positions, thin liquidity and information asymmetry.)

cc: @jc_bradbury

Plano voters rejected Proposition A on Tuesday, a ballot measure that would authorize new venue-related taxes to help finance a proposed Dallas Stars arena and entertainment district at the Shops at Willow Bend. cbsnews.com/texas/news/plano…

The favorite on Kalshi won 479 of 487 midterm races so far. That’s 98%, forecasted before a single vote was counted. The markets beat the polls and the models. The data 🧵

#PapaLeoneXIV #LeoneXIV Nel pomeriggio di oggi, mercoledì 4 novembre, Papa Leone XIV ha ricevuto in udienza privata il signor Robert Allen Zimmerman, in arte Bob Dylan Grazie ad @antoniospadaro per aver reso possibile questo incontro

Everything old is new again: agent payments edition. There's a lot of talk about agentic commerce and how it's not universally supported. Incredibly, 14 years ago, I was having the exact same conversation around a little thing called Google Wallet. Google Wallet 1.0 allowed you to onboard any payment card, which then was front-ended by a virtual Mastercard that was used at the actual merchant point of sale. (sound familiar? cough *Stripe link* cough) I was working at Visa at the time and helped reverse engineer what was actually going on under the hood. For reasons that still are relevant today, neither issuers nor the networks liked the front-ending of cards, and so a new concept called "Network Tokenization" was invented, which led to the creation of Apple Pay and Google Pay. Ironically, here we are 14 years later with the exact same problem, only in a new form called “agentic commerce”. While network tokens are now widely distributed, agentic tokens are not, so we find ourselves with similar band-aids and workarounds (like Stripe Link inserting virtual cards everywhere) as we wait for adoption to catch up. It's déjà vu all over again. 🙃

Austin on why a billion dollars could leave Binance instantly: unlike TradFi, crypto has no circuit breakers "Crypto never built itself for security outside of the tech vertical, and I think it's related to not understanding finance. You can see this with the Binance hack." "That amount of money can move instantly across networks with no double checking anywhere. Nobody building any protocol that says if you're gonna move a billion dollars, there's a 24-hour clock on that." "Part of why the hacks have been so bad is that you built a system that was optimized around the tech concerns without ever thinking about the financial risk concerns." "This is a case where AI is an enemy, purely because it lets people poke holes in all these things faster." "It also lets you patch them faster. But so far, in the classic attacker-defender ladder game, the attackers are ahead."

Each state's arch-nemesis

The Fabric of Long Island.