‘This Is Not Financial Advice’

On a lesser-known American stock exchange called “the OTC,” a company called DarkPulse Inc. trades under the ticker symbol DPLS. In February 2022, its CEO and Chairman Dennis M. O’Leary claimed on then-Twitter that DarkPulse had the potential to become a half-trillion-dollar company within seven years. Some four years later, and at the time of writing, DarkPulse is worth $2.6 million, a very long way from half a trillion.

The curious thing is that many people believed O’Leary. Back when he was making such claims, platforms like Twitter and Reddit were teeming with DarkPulse shareholders convinced that their stake in this tiny startup would one day make them rich.

OTC securities, whose name preserves an older practice of trading directly “over-the-counter” between two parties rather than on a centralized exchange, now operate like any other stock market (the largest is run by the OTC Markets Group). Often known as “penny stocks”, though not all OTC companies are penny stocks, they are incredibly high-risk investments. Remember that scene from Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street,” wherein Jordan Belfort sells a hapless investor shares in Aerotyne — “a couple of brothers making radar detectors out of their garage” — by pitching it as a cutting-edge high-tech firm awaiting imminent patent approval? That, essentially, is the OTC: a market for companies held up as the next big thing, most of which amount to nothing.

These self-styled DarkPulse shareholders, aka “Zillas,” having adopted Godzilla as their mascot (presumably due to the parallels between Godzilla’s blue atomic breath and the company’s primary product, sensing technology for infrastructure monitoring), had reason to believe they were making a speculative but not unreasonable investment. O’Leary even threw lavish shareholder parties attended by celebrities like Mario Lopez and Fred Durst.

But while the company’s CEO and its loyal shareholders were celebrating the bright future being promised, the underlying financials never came close to matching such rhetoric. Scroll through any relevant social media platform, and you’ll see that many people have lost money investing in DarkPulse. In financial markets, as long as one is careful with legalities, it is apparently permissible to make extravagant promises that never materialize.

As far back as September 2017, a good five years before O’Leary’s “half a trillion dollar” claim, the company announced a newly finalized India agency agreement “valued $1B+” that, according to its own filings, never existed; a 2018 binding letter of intent with a Kazakhstan-based operation worth $24.6 million produced no revenue; a $15 million stock buyback announced in November 2021 never happened; and a special dividend consisting of shares in its subsidiary, Optilan, announced in June 2022, was never distributed. There were even accusations of charity fraud. In October 2021, DarkPulse pledged 100% of all merchandise sales from both their online store and their first annual shareholders event to K9s for Warriors, a charity that provides service dogs to military veterans suffering from trauma. The charity claims that it never received the promised donations.

This was all great material for the eagerly awaited documentary on the company and its CEO, or as O’Leary himself suggested, maybe even DarkPulse the Movie.

O’Leary has since deleted many of the relevant social media posts, though they remain documented in 2023 court filings alleging DarkPulse engaged in misleading promotional activity and repeatedly overstated its business prospects, as well as in screenshots shared across the personal accounts of many of the company’s former believers. Neither O’Leary nor anyone associated with DarkPulse has faced criminal charges, and the company remains active and continues to trade on the OTC market.

The Carnival Of FinTwit

To understand why anyone believed O’Leary’s claims, you must first understand what social media has done to financial culture over the past decade. Stock trading was once an exclusive endeavor for investment bankers and the wealthy; now, anyone with a smartphone can open a brokerage account and build a portfolio. The number of small-time “retail traders” has grown dramatically in recent years. By 2025, retail investors accounted for roughly 20% of daily U.S. stock market trading volume, more than double their share in 2010.

This trend accelerated in early 2021, when users on the subreddit r/wallstreetbets triggered a highly publicized short squeeze in GameStop’s share price. Large numbers of traders bought the stock, driving up its price and “squeezing” those who had bet on its decline, forcing them to cover their positions at a loss. In the space of two weeks, GameStop’s share price increased by roughly 1,500%.

“In financial markets, as long as one is careful with legalities, it is apparently permissible to make extravagant promises that never materialize.”

The mechanics of the GameStop trade were less important than the cultural moment surrounding it. GameStop was a struggling brick-and-mortar retailer whose decline, to many, was emblematic of an earlier era of American consumer culture. For these retail traders, buying shares in GameStop was driven by nostalgia and a sense of grievance toward financial institutions they believed were profiting from the company’s slow demise. Hedge funds that had bet on its decline were the villains in a narrative that framed the episode as a populist revolt, and although many retail traders bought in at inflated prices and ultimately suffered losses, it was widely described as a victory for the little guy — a rare moment in which Main Street appeared to inflict genuine damage on Wall Street.

Online finance culture did not begin with GameStop. “FinTwit,” an amalgam of “financial Twitter,” and the term now used to describe the loosely organized network of finance-related discourse that operates primarily on Twitter (now X), Reddit and similar platforms, has been active for years. But what changed in 2021 was the scale of retail participation, driven by the GameStop saga, as well as pandemic lockdowns, 

FinTwit appears overwhelmingly male, and much of its vocabulary celebrates a particular form of risk-taking masculinity. Holding a stock, or “diamond hands,” is considered a strength; selling a stock, or “paper hands,” is a weakness. Acknowledging a mistake and cutting losses are reframed as personal failures.

At a time when traditional markers of male success, such as homeownership and predictable family formation, have become less attainable, many men feel increasing pressure to find a way — however reckless — to achieve prosperity and demonstrate value. That pressure exists alongside broader shifts in gendered economic expectations, with recent data suggesting single Gen Z women in the U.S. are now purchasing homes at higher rates than their male counterparts, further destabilizing older assumptions about men as chief providers and sources of financial security.

And when they fail in that pursuit, resilience can be performed (if not achieved) by holding a position through its catastrophic downturn. Real men hold the line, however red the chart. The carnival’s operators can encourage speculators to opt for risk over shame, and the result is a culture in which the pressure to hold and endure (or HODL, in FinTwit parlance) can override the basic financial logic that would otherwise guide many participants to get out while they still can.

Prophets Of Profit

Scroll through r/wallstreetbets or any of its descendants today, and you encounter a distinctive genre of posts: the “DD,” or “due diligence,” post. These are often long, confident analyses, dense with charts, annotated screenshots, technical terms and fragments from corporate filings. Increasingly, they are little more than AI slop. They resemble institutional research reports in form, providing the feeling of proximity to professional expertise, but the content often amounts to little more than extreme confirmation bias in disguise. The DD that travels best tends to be bullish (in financial terms, bulls hold a positive outlook, while bears are negative), telling the crowd what they want to hear, that a target price an order of magnitude higher is inevitable and that those who sell will regret it forever.

What emerges is a form of folk finance, an internally coherent body of belief and practice that runs parallel to professional investment research while only occasionally intersecting with it. It has its own concepts, vocabulary and prophecy structure. There is a strong resemblance to religious tradition, complete with sacred texts in the form of canonical DD posts and screenshots, rituals, slogans and daily reaffirmations of belief. 

Hovering above the retail traders, and profiting from this environment with remarkable consistency, are FinTwit’s influencers — aka “finfluencers,” or financial influencers — the carnival’s priests and preachers. On YouTube and X, their steady output of commentary on which crypto is about to “moon” or which microcap stock is allegedly “ready to run” is presented as analysis and sold as guidance. Their pronouncements are always accompanied by a disclaimer, a phrase that has become a ritual absolution: This is not financial advice. Creators tell their audience what to buy and why, then seek to avoid the ethical weight of that influence. This isn’t a question of legality: no laws are being broken when a person makes investments based on the advice of strangers online. But it is a question of responsibility — and certainly, morality — in an economy where trust has been monetized and where persuasion is routinely detached from accountability.

“Real men hold the line, however red the chart.”

Influencers monetize attention, so their revenue streams don’t require their audience to profit. They require only continued engagement so they can get paid by platforms while pushing affiliate links and pursuing sponsorships. Undoubtedly, many finfluencers do hold positions in the assets they discuss, but it is through content about the market, not the market itself, that they make their money. After all, if they really were all the financial gurus they pretend to be, why would they need a side hustle making videos for YouTube?

Consider the British crypto influencer Peter Anthony, who posts to The House of Crypto, a YouTube channel with almost 300,000 subscribers (not an enormous audience by today’s social media standards, but still roughly the population of a small city). Anthony’s output often focuses on alternatives to Bitcoin, or “altcoins,” cryptocurrencies that are wildly speculative. If a buyer lands on the right altcoin at the right moment, they can secure returns that would be unthinkable in conventional markets, but the opposite usually happens: altcoins frequently collapse to a fraction of their purchase price.

Anthony’s YouTube content and clickbait titles offer a masterclass in manufactured urgency: “Crypto Awaiting This Major Flashing Signal For The Real Altcoin Move! DO NOT MISS IT!!”, “Crypto Has 6 Days Left Before This MAJOR Shift Happens! Be Ready!!!”, “The ULTIMATE Bull Signal! Once In A Lifetime Event Coming”, “These Altcoins Can Make You Rich But You Need To Know Something.”

Matthew Perry, who posts under the handle @Perry8k to an audience of over 200,000 YouTube subscribers, operates similarly. Perry has been among the most vocal promoters of JasmyCoin (which trades as JASMY), a token associated with a Japanese IoT platform that currently trades at just around half a cent (that’s $0.058 as of May 22, 2026), collapsing from a one-time high of almost $5 in February 2021. Perry, who has disclosed holding a substantial amount of JASMY — and so, at the very least, has skin in the game — has posted many bullish videos over the course of this collapse, often framing lows as a buying opportunity (a common cope in the world of FinTwit). He has videos describing JASMY as the “Bitcoin of Japan” and frequently reminds his viewers that they are “sleeping on #JASMY,” that it will “shock the world.”

Perry’s YouTube content offers scant analysis to justify these claims, yet thousands of people still consume his content. One cannot simply shrug off the moral responsibility that comes with such a platform. Perry was also a paid promoter of Elmo, a meme token named after the Sesame Street character, which launched in 2023. Like JasmyCoin, it has also seen its value collapse. The current market cap of Elmo — that is, the total value of every circulating ELMO token — comes, again, at the time of writing, to a paltry $255,570. But Perry once told his many followers that “ELMO Will Be The Next Meme Coin To Make Millionaires!!!”

The YouTube content produced by Anthony and Perry provides dozens of examples of the human slop produced by FinTwit influencers: capitalization, exclamation marks and accompanying thumbnails with mouth agape and eyes wide. Scroll through the results of a YouTube search for the term “crypto”, and you encounter rows of grown men performing such incredulity in the hope of one more click.

Another influencer, Lark Davis, often goes by the moniker “The Crypto Lark,” and has built a following of roughly two million across X and YouTube. In 2022, pseudonymous blockchain investigator ZachXBT published a detailed thread alleging that Davis was systematically exploiting his followers. Davis responded to the allegations by stating that he always discloses when he is invested in a token sale, but a subsequent Fortune investigation independently confirmed Davis received early access to tokens as a presale investor in at least eight crypto projects, promoted those projects to his audience and then sold his holdings within hours of the promotion — pocketing, by ZachXBT’s estimate, over $1.2 million.

When Fortune contacted Davis, he admitted the analysis was correct, though his defense was striking for its candor: “Investors need to secure profits when they have them, which is what I do and did.” This is, of course, precisely the problem. Davis secured his profits. His followers, who bought on the strength of his promotion, did not. As one of them, a Nigerian doctor studying in the UK who had invested $6,000 and watched it dwindle to $1,000, told Fortune: “They tell you when to buy, but they never tell you when to sell.”

“They tell you when to buy, but they never tell you when to sell.”

What Davis was allegedly doing is called a “pump and dump,” a form of market manipulation in which a person or group acquires a position in a security or token, promotes it to inflate its price, and then sells into the demand their own promotion has generated. The followers who bought on the back of the recommendation are left holding a depreciating asset while the promoter walks away with a profit. It is, in its crudest form, a confidence trick that relies on the language of financial analysis. And while the practice predates social media, online platforms have provided an infrastructure for executing it at scale, because a single tweet to 500,000 followers can move the price of a thinly traded stock in minutes.

One of the more notorious examples of an alleged pump and dump involves Edward Constantinescu, better known by his Twitter handle @MrZackMorris (named after the protagonist of the American sitcom “Saved by the Bell”) who, along with seven associates operating under the collective banner of Atlas Trading, ran what the Department of Justice described as a social media-based pump and dump operation spanning from around January 2020 to around April 2022 and generating approximately $114 million in profits. The group had a combined Twitter following of roughly 1.5 million. Their method was straightforward: identify a low-volume, small-cap stock; purchase shares at a low price, then promote the ticker aggressively on Twitter and in their Discord server; post bullish price targets and urge followers to buy and hold. Once the price had been driven up by the resulting demand, they sold.

In one instance, Constantinescu purchased two million shares of Camber Energy at roughly 50 cents apiece, posted a price target of $10 to his followers, and then sold his entire holding at $2.61, pocketing $4.3 million while those who had followed his call watched the price collapse. Throughout all of this, the group maintained the standard disclaimers, telling their followers that all this financial advice was not, in fact, financial advice. In a recorded exchange that was later cited in the federal indictment, a member of Atlas Trading, Daniel Knight — who went by “Deity of Dips” and co-hosted a podcast with another member called “Pennies: Going in Raw” — told a fellow member that they were “robbing fucking idiots of their money.”

In December 2022, both the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the DOJ brought charges that, after a dismissal and an appeals court reversal, remain ongoing. In the meantime, Constantinescu has spent years taunting the SEC on his Twitter account. He is, at the time of writing, back on the platform and running a paid Discord community called FU Money Club that charges members $100 per month.

The conduct alleged against Atlas Trading is not straightforwardly comparable to what most finfluencers might be accused of. Constantinescu and his associates were charged with securities fraud because they promoted stocks with a specific, concealed intention to inflate the price, then sold into the demand they had manufactured. When someone like Perry posts a series of videos insisting that JasmyCoin will shock the world, he may well believe it. His sin, if it is one, is closer to recklessness than fraud; the sustained, confident promotion of a collapsing asset to a large audience, without the analytical rigor that such influence ought to demand.

Davis’s behavior, as documented by ZachXBT, is closer to that of Atlas Trading, but even there, the legal landscape differs because cryptocurrencies occupy a regulatory grey zone that traditional securities do not (though this could change any day with the passing of the CLARITY Act and related legislation). But the point is that FinTwit’s capacity for harm doesn’t depend on orchestrated fraud at a major scale — there is sufficient damage done by smaller YouTube channels and X accounts pushing conviction plays to audiences who take them at their word.

As of May 2026, the total altcoin market capitalization is almost half of its late-2024 peak, with many individual tokens back to or below their 2022 bear market lows. The “altseason” that has been promised for years, the great rotation of capital from Bitcoin into smaller altcoins that is supposed to deliver transformational returns to those patient and brave enough to hold, has simply not come.

Some analysts argue there will never be another altseason, that the institutional capital flowing into Bitcoin through ETFs means broad-based altcoin rallies will be a relic of an earlier, more retail-driven era. This means that for years, these social media influencers have been relentlessly bullposting about assets that have only declined in value. Their followers, trusting the analysis and heeding the injunction to hold, have watched their portfolios bleed.

“For years, these social media influencers have been relentlessly bullposting about assets that have only declined in value.”

Not every finfluencer operates this way. Benjamin Cowen, who holds a PhD in nuclear engineering and runs the YouTube channel “Into the Cryptoverse,” takes a quantitative rather than narrative-driven approach, built on data models and historical pattern analysis. He is far from infallible, but what distinguishes him from the perma-bulls is a willingness to tell his audience things they do not want to hear and present both bull and bear cases.

As Cowen told his YouTube followers, “a lot of people prefer a lie over an inconvenient truth,” adding that “it’s very easy every year to find a reason, to find a narrative to support why illiquid altcoins have to rally.” And that’s really the core of the FinTwit problem: for people who need the future to be different from the present, a lie is often preferable to the truth. But ultimately, influencers who knowingly capitalize on such vulnerability don’t seem to care whether their predictions are right or wrong, only whether the audience keeps coming back.

Tulips At The Speed Of Light

Speculative excess has a long history, from the Dutch tulip trade to the dot-com era, each episode shaped by herd behavior and the intoxicating possibility of sudden gain. What has changed with FinTwit is the communications infrastructure through which mania is produced and sustained. Earlier bubbles were constrained by geography and the slower pace of information flow. Today, a narrative can be assembled and amplified within hours, allowing a penny stock or newly minted crypto token to spike and collapse on the back of extremely short-lived virality. Bubbles now seem like a permanent feature of the landscape, the objects of speculation simply rotating depending on influencer posting.

Awareness of this cycle is not a remedy because new modes of extraction sometimes come on the scene. Prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket, which allow users to wager on the outcome of future events, processed more than $44 billion in combined trading volume in 2025 alone. It is a staggering amount to bet on primarily binary propositions: this thing will happen, or it will not. Will Real Madrid win LaLiga? Will there be a ceasefire in Ukraine by November? Will a ten-kiloton meteor hit the Earth before 2030? Will Elon Musk post more than 20 times on X in a given week? On Polymarket, users wagered over $3 million on whether Jesus Christ would return in 2025. There is no DD to write about the Second Coming. Advocates of platforms like Polymarket frame them as tools for aggregating information and forecasting outcomes, but in practice, they frequently resemble gambling platforms built around speculative bets on headline events.

Prediction markets are an endpoint of the gamification of finance, when it stops pretending to be finance at all. Kalshi’s co-founder and CEO Tarek Mansour has said that his “long-term vision is to financialize everything,” and the platform’s front page suggests he means it literally, a place where sports and entertainment sit beside geopolitical catastrophe and the outcomes of democratic processes, all rendered equivalent as objects of speculation. Kalshi signed deals making it the official prediction market partner of both CNN and CNBC.

Such mainstream dealings show how FinTwit’s carnival has expanded beyond the corners of X, Reddit and Discord and is now embedded in the architecture of everyday information consumption — not everyone is on Discord, but many people watch CNN and CNBC. And the demographic profile of the participants confirms what many gambling researchers have long feared, that sports betting and online gambling are disproportionately concentrated among younger men, the demographic most exposed to both economic precarity and the promise of rapid financial escape.

The trading apps that opened retail access to equity and cryptocurrency markets claim to have democratized participation, but let’s not be fooled: these are typically large companies primarily motivated by the profit potential of the mania. Robinhood, perhaps the most emblematic of these platforms, announced its intentions in its very name, invoking a folk hero who redistributes wealth from rich to poor. But the app’s design suggests that the real ambition is to just keep users in the app, spending money on trades; it borrows from the psychological architecture of gaming and gambling platforms through push notifications and engagement mechanics that researchers say encourage more frequent and speculative trading.

Coinbase, a leading retail cryptocurrency exchange, does not display unrealized gains or losses on its default interface, a design choice that allows users to avoid facing the realities of their financial situation. The investor sitting at a 40% loss sees only the current value of their position, shorn of its relationship to what was paid.

“There is no DD to write about the Second Coming.”

Like any form of gambling, these environments depend heavily on variable-ratio reinforcement schedules, an operant conditioning mechanism long identified as a reliable producer of compulsive behavior: unpredictable rewards sustain engagement, small wins maintain hope and losses provoke the desire to recover, so that the user returns to the feed, returns to make yet another trade, and each return generates more commission and more monetizable behavior. It is a loop in which the platform captures value at every turn of the wheel.

Much of this works because FinTwit communities maintain a distinctive and philosophically interesting relationship with temporality; the future is always about to vindicate believers and punish doubters. 

It is in this sense that the carnival of FinTwit is truly a social and psychological phenomenon, one sustained by the convergence of economic desperation, platforms designed for addiction, influencer monetization, permissive disclosure regimes and a culture that has somehow managed to elevate conviction above analysis. Here, Robinhood’s name is uttered so that the poor might think they have a fighting chance against the rich, but this promise obscures an inherently extractive architecture.

Escaping The Carnival

The literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque describes a temporary suspension of ordinary hierarchies in which the fool is crowned king and established authority is mocked, an inversion that feels liberating to its participants but which, crucially, leaves the actual structures of power undisturbed when the carnival ends. FinTwit operates according to precisely this logic, as a space where retail traders perform the role of market-makers, where pseudonymous accounts assume the authority of analysts, where the language of institutional finance is appropriated by novices, and where the exhilaration of participating in what feels like a collective overthrow of the old order obscures the fact that the old order is, in most cases, happily taking the other side of the trade.

It is easy to treat all of this as an amusing cultural phenomenon happening to others online, but the stakes are not abstract. A screenshot showing a $50,000 portfolio reduced to $3,000, posted to a Reddit thread as “loss porn” and met with laughing emojis and commiserations laced with irony, is still an actual human being who has tangibly lost potentially years of savings and may not be able to afford rent.

The psychological toll runs in parallel with the financial one, and it follows patterns that clinicians have long understood in other contexts. Gambling addiction, with all its attendant destruction of relationships, mental health and self-conception, has found a new and largely unregulated vector in gamified trading applications and in FinTwit communities that normalize obsessive engagement as a sign of commitment rather than a symptom of compulsion. The person checking their portfolio 50 times a day, unable to sleep while markets are open in another time zone, experiencing their self-worth as a direct function of whether a line on a chart is green or red, is exhibiting behavior that in any other context would be immediately recognized as pathological.

And then there are the suicides, which do not often make the news, but which represent a logical terminus of a culture that celebrates reckless risk-taking and shames those who protect themselves. In June 2020, Alex Kearns, a 21-year-old University of Nebraska student trading options on Robinhood, saw what appeared to be a negative balance of $730,000 on his account and, believing he had obligated his family to an unpayable debt, took his own life. The balance was a display artifact due to complex, unsettled weekend options trades that Kearns didn’t understand, and the real balance would have been displayed the following Monday. The night he died, Kearns emailed Robinhood’s customer support three times and received only automated replies. In his note, he asked how a 21-year-old with no income had been permitted to take on almost $1 million in leverage.

The incident prompted Robinhood to implement stricter guidelines around who can access complex trading instruments. In a comment, the company said it “remain[s] committed to making Robinhood a place to learn and invest responsibly,” and that its mission is to “democratize finance for all.” The Kearns family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Robinhood that the company settled in 2021 for an undisclosed amount. 

Acknowledging that this game destroys people would require confronting the possibility that the game itself is the problem. So, most FinTwit influencers shrug and insist that those they influence take personal responsibility. Ignoring the personal ruin FinTwit causes is an essential condition of the carnival’s perpetuation. As long as the gap between what a life costs and what labor pays continues to widen, reckless financial speculation will likely feel like the only game in town.

“Ignoring the personal ruin FinTwit causes is an essential condition of the carnival’s perpetuation.”

Those who lose money are participants in a system that has failed them twice, first by dismantling the economic conditions under which ordinary prudence could yield a dignified life, and then by offering them a fantasy of escape whose primary function is to transfer their remaining resources elsewhere.

One might reasonably ask where the regulators are in all of this. The SEC, which is supposed to protect investors from precisely this kind of conduct, has acted when the evidence is dramatic enough and the perpetrators brazen enough, as the Atlas Trading prosecution demonstrates. But DarkPulse presents a pattern that ought to trouble any regulator paying attention: a company that announced a $1-billion deal with Kazakhstan that never materialized, that promised a $15 million stock buyback and then did the opposite, that pledged charity donations to a veterans’ organization and apparently never delivered them, that teased an NHL smart puck and a $500 billion valuation while trading at fractions of a cent, and that did all of this publicly, on Twitter, in press releases, while thousands of retail investors poured money into a position that the company’s own financials could never have supported. If this does not meet the threshold for regulatory intervention, then what does?

In a 2021 press release seeking to engage the public on digital engagement practices, Gary Gensler, then chair of the SEC, said: “While new technologies can bring us greater access and product choice, they also raise questions as to whether we as investors are appropriately protected when we trade and get financial advice.” This suggests that there is, or at least was, some appetite to do more, but at present, the SEC’s enforcement apparatus seems built for an era in which fraud was conducted in private, in-person meetings and over phone calls, rather than in plain sight at scale. The carnival, it turns out, does not need to hide; it operates in the open, and the absence of consequences is itself part of the show, a silence that participants interpret as permission and that operators interpret as invitation.

The silence has grown louder still. In October 2025, Trump Media and Technology Group announced Truth Predict, a prediction market built into Truth Social in partnership with Crypto.com, allowing users to bet on elections, interest rate changes, commodity prices and sporting events. Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., sits on Polymarket’s board, holds a venture capital stake in the company and serves as a paid strategic adviser to Kalshi. The Trump family now has exposure to three of the largest prediction market platforms, while President Trump himself retains the capacity to directly influence the outcomes being wagered upon. One need not work very hard to imagine the scenario: tariffs announced, government services cut and those with proximity to the decision trading on its consequences via a family-backed platform.

Because prediction markets are generally regulated as derivatives rather than securities, traditional insider-trading rules do not straightforwardly apply. In January 2026, an anonymous trader on Polymarket profited by more than $400,000 betting Nicolás Maduro would be removed from power, hours before a U.S. operation successfully did so. Last month, U.S. soldier Gannon Ken Van Dyke was charged with unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain, a charge to which he has pleaded not guilty. It will be interesting to see how the prosecution fares and whether updated regulatory frameworks are forthcoming.

Perhaps the most painful dimension of all this is that many of the people losing money through retail trading apps, crypto investing and prediction markets possess a kind of awareness of their own position. They describe themselves as “regarded,” a deliberate misspelling that circumvents Reddit’s automated moderation of the underlying slur and functions as a self-deprecating acknowledgment of their role within this carnival economy. They joke about diamond-handing to zero and share screenshots of devastated portfolios with a gallows humor that suggests they understand, on some level, that the game is structured against them. But they keep playing, because it is easier to hold and hope than to face a world that makes the carnival feel necessary in the first place.

How do you escape the carnival? Winning only confirms the logic that keeps the carnival running, and losing is a temporary setback before the next opportunity for what is promised. Just leaving the carnival would require an alternative, and for the people who need the carnival most, there is none.

“The Trump family now has exposure to three of the largest prediction market platforms, while President Trump himself retains the capacity to directly influence the outcomes being wagered upon.”

Those with the power to build alternatives seem uninterested, possibly because the carnival is extraordinarily profitable for the major companies and political actors now embedded within it. Securities regulators could enforce existing disclosure requirements against OTC companies whose public statements bear no relationship to their filings, without new legislation. All platform designers could be compelled to display unrealized losses by default, impose cooling-off periods on volatile trades and remove gamification features that dress brokerage accounts in the aesthetics of slot machines. Legislators could mandate that influencers who promote financial instruments to audiences above a certain threshold be held to the same standards of disclosure and accountability as licensed advisers whose authority they have appropriated, regardless of whether they append meaningless disclaimers to their content. Prediction markets could be brought under the same gambling regulations that apply to every casino and sportsbook.

While major prediction platforms now offer some voluntary responsible-trading tools, clinicians, regulators and consumer advocates argue that the safeguards remain fragmented and poorly integrated compared to traditional gambling. None of these proposals requires a radical reimagining of financial regulation; most would simply involve applying existing consumer-protection and disclosure frameworks to new technologies and speculative instruments that have evolved faster than the rules governing them.

But each of these interventions runs against the interests of someone who profits from the carnival’s continuation. The political class, which might once have been expected to intervene on behalf of its constituents being harmed, has instead entered the casino as an operator. As long as the economic conditions that drive people into the carnival persist, the desperation that makes speculative gambling feel rational will only be reinforced.

Prediction markets have seen some political backlash, and numerous bills to restrict platforms like Polymarket have been proposed in the US. Senators have recently banned themselves and their staff from participating in such markets due to obvious conflicts of interest and concerns about insider trading. But prediction markets are just a new and highly visible example of a much broader system in which precarity and social media have increasingly collapsed into one another. Cases involving soldiers allegedly trading on military intelligence are headline-grabbing because they are so extreme. The more pervasive problem lies in the countless finfluencers and OTC executives who make extravagant or misleading promises to enrich themselves, whether through engagement, sponsorships or the selling of shares, while the people persuaded to believe them are left absorbing the losses.

The truest path to shutting down the carnival is holding people accountable for the harm they cause. Simply stating that something is “not financial advice” should not magically dissolve influencers of any responsibility for having pushed their followers into purchasing a collapsing asset. And increasingly, there is reason to ask whether the platforms themselves should continue escaping scrutiny.

Recent rulings against Meta and Google over the addictive design of their platforms suggest courts are becoming more willing to treat algorithmic amplification and engagement-driven design as matters of legal responsibility. If social media companies can be held liable for systems that encourage compulsive use and psychological harm, it is not difficult to imagine a future in which platforms that publish financially destructive misinformation face consequences for doing so.

For now, the carnival continues, and the crowd keeps turning up on the promise that the next time will be the one that changes everything — all the while, very few actually grow richer.