Are prediction markets biased by white men? Republicans? Young people? Dartmouth professor Eric Zitzewitz analyzed 145 years of election prediction market data, spanning multiple exchanges and countries. His findings: • No systematic evidence of political bias across different eras, countries, and offices. • No systematic evidence of pricing bias based on candidates’ race, gender, or age in the recent elections studied. • Traders weren’t always representative of the voting population, yet that didn’t translate into systematic bias in election forecasts. The paper points to a powerful mechanism: people who spot a mispriced outcome have a financial incentive to correct it. Even if some participants trade on personal preferences, informed traders keep prices grounded in reality. Open competition incentivizes research, challenges consensus, and gives the best ideas a chance to surface. People are rewarded for being right, regardless of their background or preferences. The paper does find some pricing biases, including slight overpricing of longshots and underpricing of favorites. Its central finding on election markets remains: no systematic evidence of political or demographic bias. In an increasingly polarized world, these markets give us something valuable: an impartial source of information shaped by people with an incentive to get it right.

CBS News and Kalshi are partnering for the midterms. Kalshi forecasts for key races and control of Congress will complement CBS’s reporting, polling, and expert analysis. Markets aggregate beliefs from millions of Americans and force ideas from all sides to compete in the open, driven by a simple and transparent incentive: to be right. They give someone who spots a mistaken consensus a financial incentive to challenge it: if you think the market has it wrong, you can trade against it and be rewarded. You basically get paid to be right. That opportunity gives people a reason to dig deeper, build better models, find information others missed, and challenge assumptions others take for granted by trading on the knowledge they acquired. Their competing views and collective knowledge become a public forecast that updates in real-time and that we all benefit from, whether we ever place a trade or not. Unlike most sources of information, this information is produced bottom-up, not by elites, but by millions of people researching and trading across the country. And now CBS viewers will have access to it.

We just launched gold and silver perpetuals in the US. And commodity derivatives are now our fastest-growing product. Markets started with grain and metals, expanded into rates, indices, and other financial assets, and are now expanding into information itself, pricing not just assets but outcomes about the future. Prediction markets ask questions with defined resolution: What will GDP be this quarter? Who will win tonight? Perps ask continuous questions, with no expiration: Where is gold going? Prediction markets, traditional futures, and perps are built on the same idea: match buyers and sellers, let them compete in an open market, and discover a price. Traders bring different information and beliefs, and that competition produces a price the rest of us can use as a signal. It’s part of a centuries long evolution toward markets as a general-purpose technology for pricing and managing uncertainty. Prediction markets are one frontier of this evolution. Commodity perps are another.

Ahead of today’s US Open final, we took out full-page ads in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. The idea is simple: competition makes things better. Five-time US Open champion Pete Sampras didn’t become a legend competing alone. He needed someone on the other side of the net. Someone who saw the point differently. Who challenged every shot. Who made him earn every win. At 17, Sampras made his US Open debut and lost in the first round. Two years later, he beat Ivan Lendl, John McEnroe, and Andre Agassi to become the youngest men’s US Open champion ever. In 1992, he returned to the final and lost to Stefan Edberg. The loss made Sampras “obsessed with being the best.” He trained harder and won the US Open again the next year. At each step along the way, the competition got better, and Sampras had to get better with it. That’s what open competition does. It exposes weaknesses, rewards what works, and forces everyone to keep improving. Over time, the best rise to the top, and the level of the entire game gets better. But that only works when competition is truly open. Anyone can compete. Everyone plays by the same rules. Everyone can see the score and how the game is being played. And no one gets punished for being too successful. The strongest financial markets are built on the same principles of competition. Anyone can participate. Everyone trades under the same rules. Prices and activity are transparent for everyone to see. And no one is limited simply because they’re too successful. On a financial exchange, people bring different information, beliefs, and views of what something is worth, then put money behind those views. That competition drives price discovery. When traders are right, they’re rewarded with more resources to put behind their views. Positions get bigger. The stakes get higher. Better information is rewarded, worse information is punished, and thousands of competing views are distilled into a single market price. That price is useful to everyone, not just the people trading. It becomes a real-time signal of what the market collectively believes, helping us better understand what is happening and what is likely to happen next. Competition breeds legends. And better market prices.