🚙 A car the Chinese won't copy

It’s Thursday already and the world once again refuses to calm down for five minutes.

Oddly enough, the main topic this week is not Iran, Hormuz, or whether the Fed is about to accidentally rediscover 1970s stagflation.

It’s Ferrari.

More specifically: Ferrari somehow unveiling a $640k EV that large parts of the internet think resembles a Nissan Leaf that discovered wealth management.

This takes real talent.

People who can afford Ferraris are horrified. People who absolutely cannot afford Ferraris are also horrified. Truly unifying stuff. The car may drive like a spaceship engineered by Italian gods. But unfortunately the first thing people do with a Ferrari is look at it.

And right now the collective market reaction appears to be:

The former Ferrari legend, Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, publicly slammed the design, stating he hoped they would "remove the Prancing Horse" and that it is "certainly a car that at least the Chinese won't copy"…. auch….

I’m awaiting

Meanwhile, the long-awaited Iran peace deal remains stuck in what diplomats lovingly call:

Which sounds harmless until you realise the words being debated are potentially things like:

Tiny wording differences.
Minor implications for civilisation.

At the same time…. bombs are dropping again. First the US. Then Iran. Markets are pricing it as: these are short term bumps on the road to peace… not so sure myself

In other news:

Trump went on his own social media (yeah, I know.. it’s odd) and tweeted the above.

Prediction markets becoming visibly tied to Trump may end up being the industry's biggest long-term risk.

Because the moment Democrats regain power, dismantling large parts of it becomes an easy political win:

The industry probably needed bipartisan legitimacy.

Instead it’s increasingly looking like:
crypto with a MAGA hat on.

Europe’s first fully regulated prediction market operator just got licensed in Gibraltar…

…and somehow also became FIFA’s official prediction market partner for the 2026 World Cup.

The company is ADI Predictstreet:

Which naturally raises some fun questions.

How does a platform most people have barely heard of suddenly land:

At minimum, it shows prediction markets are rapidly moving from “internet gambling experiment”…
into geopolitics, sovereign capital, and institutional sports money.

And you do start wondering whether somewhere in this structure there’s:

The football world cup is only a few weeks away. This means that loads of Americans with money and no insight into football will be live on Kalshi, Polymarket and…

Here are the most interesting takes so far:

🇪🇸 Spain’s entire World Cup may come down to whether they protect Lamine Yamal through the easy group stage… or accidentally leave him undercooked for the knockouts.

🇫🇷 France meanwhile has the opposite problem:
too many stars, too many egos, too many strikers wondering why they’re on the bench.

And the hosts?
The US, Mexico, and Canada are all being priced like home advantage turns average teams into 🇧🇷 Brazil 1970.

Sometimes home pressure lifts you.
Sometimes it just gives millions of people front-row seats to your collapse.

I’ll be digging deeper into the world cup and the various markets opening up in a later newsletter.

In the last week, we’ve had a number of super interesting markets adsadasdasd

Prediction markets just got another brutal reminder that sports remain the hardest asset class on earth. This time it was golf that caused the upset!

Scheffler entered the PGA Championship at 17%.
Aaron Rai was basically a rounding error.

Four days later:

That’s the beauty of sports markets.

You can build models.
Study course history.
Analyse strokes gained.
Track weather patterns.

And then some guy named Aaron Rai appears from the statistical wilderness and turns 3¢ contracts into life-changing money by Sunday evening.

By the back nine, the spreadsheets are usually dead anyway.

The football sport season is over, now we’re awaiting peak tennis, national football (world cup), NBA finals and more. So…. sports will always be there. I will be having a look at:

The “60 ships through Hormuz” market was one of the cleanest examples of markets misunderstanding physical reality.

People kept buying the diplomatic headlines:

Meanwhile actual ship traffic was: 4.

Not 40.
Not 20.
Four.

Prediction markets kept pricing politics.
The winning trade was pricing logistics.

Because even if Trump announced peace tomorrow morning, you still need:

Reality moves slower than headlines.
That was the entire trade.

You can STILL get your hands on the very free Priced In beginners guide to Prediction Markets here

Sri Lanka apparently decided to pardon the cow named after Donald Trump.

Which suggests someone in government eventually realised:

might not be the ideal international headline. When the US president is Donald Trump.