Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour asserts that financial event contracts aggregate data effectively enough to outperform traditional weather forecasts.
Assertion Partly supported
Mansour: Kalshi is the sole legal, regulated US election trading exchange
“So we won this month, and the cool thing now is, like, it's the first time in a hundred years that betting on the election, trading on the election is actually legal in the U.S., It's finally back to actually being legal, and this time it's actually regulated,…”
Opinion
Mansour: Most data science and published health papers are "total garbage"
“One, generally speaking, don't listen to data scientists. Data science is mostly bullshit. Health papers and stuff like most of them are just total garbage.”
Disclosure
Mansour: Sequoia and YC warned Kalshi against suing the CFTC
“When Juan and I brought it up to Alfred and from Sequoia and then YC, we're like, Hey, we're going to sue the government, our regulator. And they're like, we, it's never a good idea. It's just a bad pattern, but we took the risk”
Insight
Mansour: Prediction markets hedge organic risks unlike artificial gambling
“Like, grain prices, or hurricanes, or Brexit happening or not, or election, Trump versus Kamala winning, that's a risk that exists already, right? Like, it's not like you and I are creating this risk so that we can bet on it. This exists already, and some peop…”
Insight
Mansour: Y Combinator advertises like casinos by spotlighting outlier winners
“So how do casinos actually advertise their products? They, like, show you the one person that made 300,000 dollars in the slot machine. People get excited and everyone goes and does it. And, you know, everybody knows the odds, et cetera. YC kind of does the sa…”
Assertion Supported
Mansour: Kalshi beat Bloomberg and Economist inflation forecasts
“We have been the most accurate forecast for inflation over the last two years. Which is really hard to forecast. We're better than Bloomberg. We're better than the Economist survey.”