You have been sold a lie about prediction markets. It is called "the wisdom of crowds."
A new paper from London Business School and Yale looked at 1.72 million Polymarket accounts and $13.76 billion in trading volume. What they found should end the argument forever.
Just 3% of traders drive nearly all the price discovery. The other 97% mostly lose money to them.
What the study actually did
The authors — Roberto Gómez-Cram (LBS), Yunhan Guo, Theis Ingerslev Jensen (Yale SOM), and Howard Kung — used every Polymarket trade from 2023 to 2025. They classified traders by whether their bets moved prices toward the correct final outcome.
The result was uncomfortable for both sides of the prediction-market debate.
The "crowd wisdom" narrative was wrong. Prediction market accuracy does not come from millions of amateurs averaging out to genius. It comes from a tiny group of consistently skilled traders who keep showing up.
The "insider trading" narrative was also wrong. Insiders exist. They move prices seven to twelve times more per dollar than skilled traders. But their trades are rare and concentrated in a few events. They are not the day-to-day engine.
Why 3% is a bigger number than it sounds
The 3% is persistent. If you were skilled in one period, you were much more likely to be skilled in the next period than random chance predicts. This is not luck reshuffling. This is a genuine information edge.
These traders share three characteristics. They react to public news the moment it lands. They arbitrage away pricing inconsistencies between related contracts. They trade against the emotional herd — buying when the crowd panics, selling when the crowd celebrates.
Nothing exotic. Nothing that requires a Bloomberg terminal. Just discipline plus attention.
The Fed test the paper ran
Around FOMC meetings, the skilled traders moved first. They bought contracts aligned with the Fed's actual decision minutes before the announcement moved prices to their level.
Same pattern around corporate earnings. Skilled traders positioned correctly ahead of results. Amateurs traded on gut feel afterward.
The result: skilled traders' profits came directly from amateurs' losses. The market is efficient because someone informed is willing to eat the difference.
What this means for retail traders
If you assume you are part of the 97%, you are almost certainly right. Roughly two out of three Polymarket users lose money on average. That does not mean you should not trade. It means you should trade differently.
Read the paper. React to news, don't front-run it. Look at cross-contract arbitrage — if "Democrats win House" is 87% but "Democrats win 220+ House seats" is 74%, someone is mispricing a related market. Trade against emotional swings, not with them.
The 3% do exactly this. They are not smarter. They are more consistent.
What the crowd gets wrong
Most retail traders think prediction markets are democratic. They are not. They are a knowledge tournament where 3% collect the pot.
The good news: the pot still exists. Prediction markets are still the most accurate forecasting tool humans have built, precisely because a small group of skilled participants keeps prices honest.
The bad news: if you don't do the work, you're the fuel.
What Juno lets you do
Juno was built on a bet that Thai traders can learn to be in the 3%. Financial literacy is not innate. It's a skill. Reading rate decisions, tracking calibration, calibrating your own gut against a live probability — this is training you can't get from a stock chart.
You start by watching the numbers move. You learn by making small predictions and grading yourself. Over time, you calibrate. That is the entire game.
Prediction markets are not the wisdom of crowds. They are a school for anyone willing to attend.
The re-frame
The crowd does not know anything special. But the person who watches the crowd, notices when it panics, and quietly trades against it — that person is the 3%. Prediction markets are not democratic. They are meritocratic. That distinction is worth everything.