You launched a prediction market… she launched a prediction market… all God’s children are launching prediction markets.

At this point, if you told me your neighborhood HOA was launching a prediction market to bet on whose trash cans violate ordinance #7B, I’d believe you. We’re gone. Society has tipped. We’re in the upside-down (more on that in just a second).

Robinhood’s got one. Kalshi’s got one. Polymarket is out here acting like DraftKings with a philosophy minor. And now (out of absolutely nowhere) Fanatics is like, “Yeah, sure, we’ll take a crack at it too.”

Fanatics. The place I buy Titans gear from every year no matter how bad my Tennessee Titans play. Yeah, those guys are entering financial markets.

Prediction markets used to be niche tools for econ nerds and crypto weirdos to bet on CPI prints. Now they’re a legal requirement for any company with a website, and a CMO who once said “We should do something in fintech.”

Honestly, at this point I’m shocked Palantir hasn’t announced their own. 

I just assume Alex Karp holding a press release titled “Predictive Ontological Market-Based Outcome Allocation” in his filing cabinet, waiting for a full moon or a NATO contract before hitting send.

And yet… the funniest part in all of this? Robinhood popped 6% today on this news. New competition enters the arena, and Hood is like, “Cool, thanks for the free hype.” Vlad didn’t pull out a single strand of that aggressively mystical hair.

Meanwhile, Netflix tripped and fell straight into the Upside Down (-5%). Everyone else is losing their minds over the Stranger Things finale, but investors? Nope. They’re only interested in how much Netflix is willing to torch on a bid for Warner Bros Discovery. 

Only on Wall Street do you see shareholders cheering for a CEO to beat a rich kid who’s been propelled further by his surname than Elon’s biggest rocket.

Over in Washington, Donnie Tariffhands refused to take “No” from the Supreme Court like a man hearing “stop” during karaoke night. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the administration can implement tariffs even if SCOTUS punts the whole thing because apparently the 1962 Trade Act is just a Swiss Army knife of presidential trade powers. 

They’ll “recreate the exact tariff structure,” he says. Translation: The tariff dream lives on, baby.

Oh and I almost forgot, another reason the indexes got a little pep in their step is because ADP’s jobs report was so ugly it might as well have shown up in Crocs and a stained t-shirt. 

Private payrolls fell 32,000 when economists expected a gain. Historically speaking, economists don’t miss by that much unless they’re hungover or playing Wordle during the forecast.

But bad news is good news now, which is why traders instantly started pricing in an 89% chance of a rate cut next week. Isn’t it ironic that if the Fed came out tomorrow and said half the country was homeless, stocks would hit all-time highs by 9:31 am?

Tech didn’t exactly impress today, largely because Microsoft (-1%) stepped into another PR pothole. The Information reported they were trimming AI-related sales quotas. 

Microsoft insisted sales aren’t slowing… but I think we all know companies don’t lower quotas out of kindness. They only do it when numbers are moving in the wrong direction (make sure to write that one down).

And then there’s Wayfair (the same company that sold me the worst (and somehow priciest) recliner my spine has ever suffered through) getting smacked 8% by Jefferies. 

The downgrade essentially said the stock’s 40% premium to peers made no sense, which is Wall Street’s courteous way of saying, “Seek help.” It doesn’t help their case that Website traffic is slipping, holiday shopping fizzled, and Black Friday sales are nonexistent. 

And over in the Stock Prophet Watchlist, we kept the streak alive. Today’s 26% pop on VRAZ means we’ve had a winner every single day this week… 66% on QTTB, 76% on PLRZ, and now this one. 

If you tagged along on any of these, take a bow. If you didn’t… it might be time to fix that. Everything is free inside the Stocks.News app. (Download it here if you haven’t already.)

If you read all of this, congrats for having a 10 second attention span (better than me). As always, here’s our heatmap for today.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Robinhood, Netflix, and Microsoft as mentioned in the article.