The Least Wonderful Time of the Year
Animals,
I personally am a huge fan of the War on Christmas.
I know what you are thinking: it cannot possibly be true that some Right Wing lunatic, like me, who believes that America is the greatest country in the world; and that companies should be free to hire the best person for a given job (and not be woke AF), is anti-Christmas. Well, if there is one thing that we all know about politics it is that it creates strange bedfellows.
And on this issue, I am a true Progressive: I think Christmas is a fake news holiday due to the fact that it is an absolutely terrible time to bet.
The end-of-the-year (EOY) is when most political gambling trades flip into overpriced “bond” territory. A lot of the time this is great news and you should just take the money and run, but politics is a very weird business and experience has taught me that you can usually expect a few Holiday hand grenades to be mixed-in with the EOY “bonds” on PredictIt, Polymarket, and Kalshi.
Talk to anyone who has been doing this for a few years and they’ll tell you stories about getting BTFO betting on sure things with an end-of-year deadline, such as government shutdowns that were either guaranteed to happen (or not happen), debt ceiling votes that went goofy, or maybe some random must-pass/must-do item in Congress/the White House that Paul Ryan & Trump slept on.
Right now, most EOY bets are in the 85-95c range, so your upside is limited and your downside is limitless. And with the tight deadline of Jan 1, you don’t have a lot of time to think it over if the market moves against you. You could blink and then get poor AF just because Joe Manchin felt extra crabby when he woke up in his house boat this morning.
Betting on politics is flighty. Senators change their mind without explanation, natural disasters can occur, or weird procedural events might turn a certitude on its head.
I personally advise caution whenever you see a “sure thing” out there in the political gambling world. Santa Claus might have a big bag of toys for the kids, but those trinkets do not pay for themselves. I am convinced that the North Pole has a dedicated stream of revenue just from cucking sloppy traders in the last month of the year.
Stay Frosty out there, compadres.
KEENDAWG.
