There’s a spirit of altruism in these groups. @Mr.Ozi, a former management consultant who recently began training as a psychotherapist, and who has made more than $750,000 trading on prediction markets, told me: “We’re all supporting each other. We’re testing scenarios, we’re testing arguments. I’m sharing everything I know.” Sometimes, when a trader is low on cash and another has a big bankroll, the sharps — many of whom often do not know each other’s legal names — will offer to stake one another. When one 24-year-old prediction market trader lost more than a million dollars in a crypto hack, five or six guys he knew from Discord pitched in to help him get some of it back; another guy offered to float him six figures. “Obviously that was the worst day of my life,” the trader told me. “But I thought it was pretty cool that people I’ve mostly never met banded together to pay me money that they really didn’t have to.”
The private chat rooms are most active during breaking news events; intricate discussions about the movements of MH-47G Chinook helicopters are commonplace. But sometimes sharps are just coordinating the best way to buy up ignorance. Recently, after President Trump announced he would nominate the financier Kevin Warsh as the next chair of the Federal Reserve, a conspiracy theory spread online that he would instead choose Judy Shelton, who was an economic policy adviser during his first campaign. The market saw $127,684,065 in Shelton trades on Polymarket. Warsh was nominated; the “dumb money” lost millions; and per usual, the sharps won big. “You can’t stop the noobs” — the newbies — “from buying literally worthless shares, over and over and over again, every single day,” a trader who goes by @semi told me. “You can’t stop them.”
Like most successful sharps, the trader known as @CarnitasTaco wagers in all sorts of markets: gas prices, measles cases, federal debt, basketball. But his real edge is in forecasting elections. Over the past five years, he has made hundreds of thousands of dollars outsmarting pollsters and pundits; 18 months ago, after using vote-by-mail data to predict that Jacky Rosen, Democrat of Nevada, would win re-election to the U.S. Senate, CarnitasTaco was invited to join a private group called MAGA Kiwi Club. MAGA Kiwi Club members can be found trading at any hour of the day. The group recently let me observe their activities, setting up a separate chat so I could follow along in real time; its members asked me not to publish their real names or their precise returns.
MAGA Kiwi Club resembles a proto hedge fund, built entirely on trust. “To some extent there is trust formed virtually,” one member, @Iabvek, told me. “But a lot of it is backstopped by going to each other’s weddings.” Each year, the group — whose name is, deliberately, a little ridiculous, since it doesn’t have any genuine MAGA supporters — mints millions of dollars in profit. Like several other bespoke, secretive prediction market trading teams, the group doesn’t share a single bankroll so much as coordinate a decentralized one. Each of its dozen or so members has a different area of expertise. PrinceHal, the struggling screenwriter turned Nostradamus, focuses on predicting inflation data; @UtherDoul is an expert modeler; Iabvek is a voter data specialist. Two years ago, he beat other traders, having correctly forecast the results in a California congressional race after identifying hundreds of uncounted ballots in public election data.
Not long after returning from a team-bonding trip in Mexico, MAGA Kiwi Club members met me at a Homewood Suites in Dallas, where they planned to do some in-person polling for the upcoming Democratic Senate primary in Texas between the big-tent candidate James Talarico and the firebrand Jasmine Crockett — both running for a seat that the party hopes they can flip to blue.
