There is zero practical difference between going to a bookie and betting on X team to win a game and going to a broker and buying an equivalent amount of predictive futures contracts for X team to win the game. Some people can also consistently make money on sports betting apps until their accounts get banned for winning. The difference is purely the legal language used (and the elimination of any risk for the bookies).
With stock markets, at least in theory that money can be used to make a product to sell. They're not sum-zero games. Even if the company were to liquidate, you would be entitled to a share of actual assets after creditors were paid. This might seem foreign to some modern social media investors who YOLO with leverage all their money on meme stocks, but I would not be against that being reined in too.
Also, I really struggle to see anything coming out of prediction markets as valuable, especially not on a scale that would counteract their destructiveness. Like, polls are basically equally accurate, and there is zero benefit to anyone to know that there's a 76% chance that Trump will say the word "historic" during his speech Thursday.
With stock markets, at least in theory that money can be used to make a product to sell. They're not sum-zero games. Even if the company were to liquidate, you would be entitled to a share of actual assets after creditors were paid. This might seem foreign to some modern social media investors who YOLO with leverage all their money on meme stocks, but I would not be against that being reined in too.
Also, I really struggle to see anything coming out of prediction markets as valuable, especially not on a scale that would counteract their destructiveness. Like, polls are basically equally accurate, and there is zero benefit to anyone to know that there's a 76% chance that Trump will say the word "historic" during his speech Thursday.