A market set up by a New Zealand university for educational purposes now turns over millions in wagers each year on political bets such as who will win the 2024 U.S. presidential election. The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission has advised it to shutter.
The PredictIt website was born through a partnership between its creator American businessman John Aristotle Phillips and Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand.
It launched in 2014 after the university received the blessing of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Division of Market Oversight via a “no-action letter.”
In the letter, CFTC staffers highlighted the university’s assurances the betting market was meant for educational purposes—it claimed it would use the results for teaching materials in statistics and finance courses and as data for research papers — and would not turn a profit.
