“Someone at the Dolby Theatre, or someone getting texts from inside, was profiting off the seconds between their reality and mine.”
Prediction markets dress up gambling as the wisdom of the crowd. The reality is people with faster information skimming the gap between what already happened and what you know yet. The author watched someone profit off the seconds between the Oscars stage and her television. That is not a market discovering truth. That is insider trading with a friendlier app.