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“We’ve never had people in a more gambling mood,” Buffett observed.
In his 2022 letter to shareholders, he criticized mobile trading apps that make day trading and speculative positioning effortless, accusing them of turning the stock market into a “gambling parlor.”
Two years later, Buffett again targeted the “gamblification” of financial markets in his annual shareholder letter.
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If the research firm’s $190 billion taker volume estimate proves accurate, it’d represent a more than eightfold increase from the $22 billion taker turnover seen last year.
Potentially boding well for the Macquarie forecast are at least two factors. First, there are signs of turnover increases across a variety of yes/no exchanges. Second, volume surged to start September with those spikes arriving even before the NFL season kicked off.
As Macquarie analyst Chad Beynon points out, prediction markets generated $4.3 billion in taker volume during the first week of September without any help from the NFL, building on momentum from the 2026 World Cup. However, the NFL’s impact was immediate, with taker volume hitting a daily record during Week 1 of the campaign.
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Since then, annual advertising expenditure by licensed operators has grown substantially and is now estimated to be between £1 billion and £2 billion, accoridng to , the report said.
According to the committee, robust evidence now links gambling advertising to increased participation and associated harms.
Committee Chair Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede highlighted that, since 2020, the growth of online marketing techniques and associated harms have shifted the debate substantially.
