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Goldman Sachs has warned employees to limit their betting on prediction markets to sports and entertainment categories, as it confronts compliance risks posed by wagers on everything from elections to interest rates.
The Wall Street bank informed employees of the policy in an internal memo and warned multiple breaches could cost an employee their job, according to a person familiar with the matter. Goldman declined to comment. The memo was reported earlier by Bloomberg.
Heavily regulated financial institutions such as Goldman have strict rules about what transactions employees are allowed to make given the company’s proximity to material non-public information that can influence markets.
Nascent prediction market platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket pose challenges to these compliance policies.
They have grown rapidly as a way for consumers to make bets on everything from world events to the level the S&P 500 will be at at a given time. Kalshi is in talks to raise funds at a valuation of about $40bn, the FT has reported.
These platforms have also attracted scrutiny over the risk of people making trades based on advanced knowledge of certain events.
The prediction platforms have been jarred in the past year by instances of people profiting from advance knowledge of coming events. The organisers behind the Nobel Peace Prize investigated a potential leak after a flurry of successful bets were placed on the Venezuelan political leader who eventually won the award.
In another instance, a US special forces soldier with advance knowledge of the operation to capture Venezuela leader Nicolás Maduro allegedly placed bets on the event on Polymarket.
The FT has also previously identified unusually large and well-timed bets that generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits that were placed by 12 suspicious accounts in the days before the initial US attack on Iran earlier this year.
These prediction market companies make the bulk of their revenue from sports betting but are trying to branch out with financial services companies, including Kalshi building out block-trading operations.
