Prediction Markets Let You Bet on Anything. I Bet Against My Own Husband.

When everything is a market, anyone can be an insider. After watching her composer husband’s work become fodder for bets on a popular prediction market, Carrie Sun, an “MIT math nerd” and hedge-fund alumnus, decides to put a bit of her own money to work, placing wagers on Love Is Blind weddings, the Rotten Tomatoes score for Project Hail Mary, and whether former Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell would say “stagflation” in a press conference. The chief thrill, here, is watching Sun pit her own natural, human desire for drama against the insider knowledge she reveals, time and again, operating just out of plain sight.

Seconds before the first award was announced, my son finally fell asleep. I dashed to my desk just in time to see my loss. I regretted not going with the favorite. Then I settled into a rhythm, switching between the livestream, Kalshi odds, and Wikipedia entries of films I had never heard of. I learned a lot. Most interesting was how, about 20 seconds before each winner was announced on my screen, the odds for one nominee would spike to 99 percent. Then, without fail, the Oscar went to them. This looked to me like latency arbitrage in its purest form: Someone at the Dolby Theatre, or someone getting texts from inside, was profiting off the seconds between their reality and mine. When the night was over, I’d won two and lost two. I went to bed surprised, thinking, That was fun.