Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley ban staff from finance and politics prediction market bets
Goldman Sachs has barred employees from trading prediction-market contracts tied to financial markets, politics, elections, macroeconomic data, and the bank itself. Staff may still place bets on sports and entertainment contracts on platforms including Kalshi and Polymarket. Morgan Stanley has imposed a similar restriction. The moves reflect growing compliance concerns at major investment banks about potential insider trading and policy challenges posed by regulated event-contract venues.
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are the first major Wall Street banks to explicitly carve out prediction markets from employee trading policies. Their compliance officers have decided that finance and politics contracts carry unacceptable insider-risk exposure, even on CFTC-regulated platforms. This strips two deep-pocketed user bases from Kalshi and Polymarket's highest-margin product categories.
Other banks will likely copy the template rather than develop their own policies from scratch. The platforms face a shrinking institutional user pool just as they court retail traders and fight state enforcement. Sports-only access leaves election and macro markets dependent on non-financial professionals, capping volume in the categories that drove recent growth.