Still, the promise of a bookmaker like Polymarket is the same as that of every financial player: to offer trust and impartiality, admittedly relative.
When a broker sells a share, the investor (and the regulator) expects it to find the best price, and expects the quoted price not to be, in reality, the price that suits the broker. Which happens to be the business model of some neo-brokers (as we saw here with Trade Republic, or here with Revolut, both in French). That honesty is essential: everyone has to play by the same rules.
And yet it seems that this weekend at least three users had information others did not. Or a gift for clairvoyance.
Every day, dozens, even hundreds, of bets go up on the platform, on just about any subject with a whiff of media attention. Among them: the Nobel Peace Prize. For months, several contenders had been the front-runners.
On Polymarket, Navalnaya led the race all summer, starting at 18% and ending between 8 and 10%, on €570K of bets. More surprisingly, Donald Trump came in behind her, swinging between 2 and 10% depending on his statements and the news, on almost $14M of volume. By comparison, the Nobel Prize in Literature topped out at $103K of volume.
There are several possible explanations.
That last point is worth dwelling on, because it is one of the main reasons why crypto markets, and the shares linked to them (Tesla, to name just one), are so volatile.
In the Nobel’s case, nominations closed on 31 January. So when Netanyahu makes out that he has just nominated Trump for the Nobel, it is just a way of licking his boots, because he is nine months too late. Between February and March, the committee draws up a shortlist. Only then, over several months, is a lengthy review carried out before five members choose the winner, or in this case, the female winner.
So odds that move with the news are a statistical nonsense and a misunderstanding of how the system works.
How the bets on Zelensky moved over time on Polymarket.
The probability peak of 18 August 2025 matches his meeting with Donald Trump. The drop to 0 matches the moment the Nobel is awarded: the token betting on Zelensky winning the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize is worthless, since nobody is betting on it any more.
Conversely, the one on Machado shoots up to 100% when the result is announced, after $2.2M of volume.
But the betting in the final days shows a very strange curve.
Data from Polymarket, reworked for readability
A curve also found at Polymarket’s competitor, Kalshi
Machado’s price seems to have suddenly exploded while Navalnaya collapsed, then the reverse just as suddenly, before it capped out at 100.
On 10 October5, a little after midnight6, Machado is trading at around $0.036. Then suddenly, at 00:45, the price takes off and goes 10x in ten minutes.
The first sharp moves between 00:42 and 01:00
The price climbs to $0.74 at 01:55, while Trump falls below $0.02 and Navalnaya below $0.03. Then, just as suddenly, Machado hovers around $0.38 for another hour, until 02:50, before spending hours swinging around 0.6-$0.7. Until 11:01, when an order goes through at $0.83, and from 11:02, two minutes after the official announcement, the price hits its maximum.
These moves are due in particular to several users, including dirtycup, whose Polymarket account was created solely for this bet.
At 05:29, the user buys $28.93 of Machado, with the token at $0.7. Over 20 minutes, until 05:41, they pile up 99,007.5 of them at the same price.
dirtycup’s first transactions
Once the announcement is made, they pocket $99K in total, a profit of $31K. Which raises the question: who grinds through dozens of trades to bet $69K, in the middle of the night in both Europe and the US, on a candidate who is nowhere near the favourite?
dirtycup’s position after the announcement
A little earlier, at 03:48, another user, madurowilllose, bets against Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms several times for more than $25K, while starting to buy Machado. All under a username referring to Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s president, whom Machado opposes.
First activity of madurowilllose
When the position is unwound, the account, which staked $54K, pockets $18K in winnings.
But the one who seems to start the trend is 6741, another account created that same day. It is the one that buys the first Machado shares at 00:42.
The first transaction, at 00:42
It first stakes $921.83, buying 19,120.5 tokens at $0.05. Then it gradually buys up everything lying around at 10, then 20, 30, 40, 60, 65 cents and so on, apparently simply hoovering up every pending order.
Transactions between 00:50 and 01:30
Curiously, 6741 also bets against the Sudanese organisations from the start, to the tune of several tens of thousands of dollars, and trades heavily against Trump and MSF (Doctors Without Borders). In the end, it bets nearly $60K to win nearly €110K on Machado, while losing a little on its other trades. So it ends up with nearly €50K in gains.
Do these three accounts, and the handful of others that joined in, know each other? Either way, they act with identical patterns and convictions, one after the other. That said, at 06:05, the X account Polymarket Whales7 spots 6741’s bets, noting in passing how odd they are.
Admittedly, that may have inspired others. But if that were really the case, why create dedicated accounts to trade solely on this one event?
All the more so because, while it is not impossible that the insider is someone on the inside at the Nobel, very, very few people could have had access to the information: it was only at 10:50 CEST that Kristian Berg Harpviken, the brand-new director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, called María Corina Machado8 to tell her what plenty of people had apparently seen coming for a while. And which was obvious to nobody.
Because while Trump’s odds were among the highest at traditional bookmakers, for the reasons explained above, far ahead of him were the candidates already mentioned, but also more obvious names, such as UNRWA (which would have caused quite a row), the ICC (same story), MSF, the Red Cross, and individuals ranging from the Pope to William Lai, by way of Greta Thunberg.
To be completely honest, I wanted to write something about the supposedly neutral (but in fact highly political) nature of the Nobel Peace Prize, and I had been checking the odds over the past week. Neither on Unibet, nor on Ladbrokes, nor on any of their mates, did Machado’s name come up. Which is actually quite common with the Nobels. Unlike the Oscars or the Ballon d’Or, football’s top individual award, the shortlists are not public, and they hinge on such a broad range of current events that the contenders are rarely predicted.
Still, having failed to write my editorial on the subject, I can at least confirm that this award remains highly political. Partly because Machado, who had already received the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize in 2024 (jointly with Edmundo González Urrutia), is one of the few opponents of the Chávez/Maduro regime who can make herself heard. But also because Venezuela is currently at the heart of a serious diplomatic crisis with the United States and has just called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council.
As for the Norwegian Nobel Institute, it has not officially reacted, but the Norwegian paper Finansavisen (Norway’s answer to the Financial Times) reports an investigation into a computer leak9.
Last-minute edit before sending: Erik Aasheim, spokesman for the Norwegian Nobel Institute, said in a statement that, ahead of this year’s announcement, the institute had noticed that some people made significant financial gains by betting on the prize, and that it would investigate whether this meant someone had illegally obtained information from it.
Last-second edit before sending: On the Norwegian channel TV2, Harpviken has just said that this was probably espionage.