Why Prediction Markets Are the Next Frontier of Truth

I spent the first decade of my career on Wall Street.

As an investment banker, I lived and breathed markets. The opening bell wasn’t just the start of the workday. It was the firing of a starting pistol for the largest, most dynamic, and most ruthless information-processing machine ever created by humankind.

Every day, millions of participants place bets. From grizzled portfolio managers in Greenwich to retail traders in their basements they buy, they sell, they short, they hedge.

Every single one of those actions is a vote, cast with real money, about the future value of an asset.

A stock price isn’t just a number on a screen. Not really. It’s the weighted average of every opinion, every piece of analysis, every hope, and every fear about a company’s future prospects. The market is a conversation, and the price is its brutally honest consensus.

We used sophisticated models, discounted cash flows, and comps until our eyes bled, but at the end of the day, our job was to understand the sto…