By Hannah Erin Lang
"You can't have a functional financial market without speculators. If everyone's just hedging, the market is going to break... As long as you have a strategy, and it's systematic, who am I to say that you shouldn't engage in trading with that asset class?"
That's Robinhood chief executive Vlad Tenev at the WSJ's Future of Everything conference, in response to a question from an audience member about whether he considered prediction markets to be the same gambling.
The online brokerage was one of the first to move into the world of prediction-markets, which allow traders to make yes-or-no wagers on the outcome of future events, from football games to Fed meetings. A recent WSJ analysis found that a small number of accounts on Polymarket and Kalshi take home the majority of profits.
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 05, 2026 12:40 ET (16:40 GMT)
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