Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley Curb Staff Prediction Market Bets
Major Wall Street banks are restricting employee trades on platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi over mounting insider trading concerns.
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and other major Wall Street institutions are moving to restrict employees from trading on prediction markets, according to a Cointelegraph report, as fears intensify that staff with access to sensitive market-moving information could exploit platforms such as Polymarket and Kalshi for financial gain.
The crackdown reflects growing anxiety inside some of the world's most powerful financial firms that prediction markets — which allow users to bet real money on the outcomes of political, economic, and financial events — have matured rapidly enough to create genuine conflicts of interest for bankers who routinely handle confidential client data.
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Insider trading regulations in the United States traditionally govern securities transactions, but the emergence of high-volume prediction platforms has outpaced existing compliance frameworks, leaving legal and compliance teams scrambling to extend internal trading policies into this new territory before regulators step in.
The restrictions signal a broader recognition on Wall Street that prediction markets are no longer a niche novelty. With hundreds of millions of dollars flowing through platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi, even a well-timed, relatively small wager by a well-informed banker could raise serious regulatory red flags — or invite civil liability — under existing market manipulation statutes.
The policy tightening arrives as federal regulators continue to debate the legal status of prediction markets, making proactive internal compliance moves a calculated bet by major banks to stay ahead of potential enforcement actions. Continue reading at Cointelegraph.
