A single $400,000 bet by a Green Beret on a Venezuelan raid seemed to indicate an isolated incident. However, recent findings suggest it might be just the tip of the iceberg for insider trading within military markets.
The Anti-Corruption Data Collective (ACDC), a nonprofit research group, analyzed over 435,000 settled contracts on Polymarket from January 2021 through mid-March 2026, encompassing more than $54.4 billion in cumulative volume. The analysis revealed that low-probability bets related to military and defense outcomes have success rates challenging to justify by skill or chance alone.
Typically, longshot bets succeed about 14% of the time across political markets. However, ACDC found these success rates exceeded 50% for some military-linked contracts.
“Markets linked to specific government policies like those in defense and foreign affairs are more complex to predict with public information alone,” noted the authors. This complexity makes them “more prone to information asymmetries,” including insider trading or specialized insights, potentially allowing a small group of informed traders to outperform others consistently.
Polymarket highlights its market surveillance efforts and collaboration with the Department of Justice on the Venezuela case. Both Polymarket and Kalshi prohibit trading based on confidential knowledge.
The ACDC report joins other research pointing toward similar conclusions. A paper from London Business School and Yale identified that roughly 3% of traders are responsible for most price discovery on Polymarket, while Solidus Labs found that fewer than 1% of wallets capture about half of all profits. ACDC’s contribution is to suggest where some of these advantages may originate.
The report examines the June 2025 U.S. strikes on Iran as a case study. Several date-specific contracts were listed by Polymarket, and while markets tied to June 19 and 20 expired without incident, longshot bets placed in the hours leading up to the strike on June 21 successfully predicted its occurrence.
Despite Pentagon efforts to conceal the operation using decoy bombers and stealth aircraft, a select group of traders made well-timed large bets. Across Polymarket’s military and defense category, the report found that winning longshot bets outnumbered losing ones in five out of six two-hour windows before market resolution, contrary to implied market prices.
While other factors like mispricing or shifts in public expectations might explain some longshot success, the consistency of these patterns suggests some participants may possess information advantages. ACDC, funded by the Fund for Constitutional Government and lacking a surveillance product unlike Solidus Labs, recommends measures such as identity verification for bettors, conditional payouts on suspicious wagers, restrictions on small-group-decided markets, and limits on contract granularity.
Ultimately, ACDC calls for an informed debate about whether public betting should occur on these specific outcomes at all.