The alleged $400,000 insider bet by a Green Beret on a Venezuela raid may not have been an isolated incident. A recent analysis by the Anti-Corruption Data Collective, a nonprofit research organization, has found that low-probability bets on military and defense outcomes have been winning at rates that are difficult to explain through skill or luck alone. The study examined over 435,000 markets and $54.4 billion in cumulative volume on Polymarket from January 2021 to mid-March 2026 and discovered that such "longshot" bets have been successful at rates exceeding 50% in some cases, compared to a typical success rate of around 14% across political markets. The researchers suggest that markets related to government policies, including military and defense, are more susceptible to information asymmetries, such as insider trading or specialized knowledge, due to the difficulty in forecasting outcomes using public information alone.
This creates an environment in which a small group of informed traders can consistently outperform others by having access to superior information. The findings of the report add to a growing body of research indicating that a small percentage of traders are driving prices and capturing the majority of profits on Polymarket. A separate working paper from London Business School and Yale found that approximately 3% of traders account for most price discovery, while an analysis by blockchain analytics firm Solidus Labs revealed that fewer than 1% of wallets capture about half of all gains.
The report's authors propose several measures to address these concerns, including identity verification for bettors, conditional payouts on suspicious wagers, restrictions on markets whose outcomes are decided by small groups, and limits on the granularity of contracts. Ultimately, the report concludes by calling for a broader debate on whether the public should be allowed to bet on these outcomes at all.