Managing Editor
Swifties learned overnight on Tuesday of their beloved pop idol’s engagement to her long-time boyfriend Travis Kelce, but at least one Polymarket user appears to have known this was coming nearly 24 hours before.
“Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married,” Taylor Swift posted to her Instagram account, accompanied by a proposal photo in a flower garden. The post has over 32 million likes.
Less than 24 hours earlier, a single Polymarket user going by “romanticpaul” began buying up Yes shares of the corresponding Polymarket contract: Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce Engaged in 2025?
His trading caused a spike in the share price from 25 cents to around 40 cents. Perhaps taking the hint, other Polymarket users caused the price to continue to creep up more slowly until the moment of the announcement.
Polymarket also currently rates the chances of a Swift pregnancy announcement before the end of the year at 16%, up from 10% a few weeks ago.
Unlike Kalshi, which is a financial product regulated by the CFTC, Polymarket is currently offshore and cryptocurrency-driven. However, it plans to launch a CFTC-regulated US product in the near future.
Because of that, Romanticpaul’s identity is unknown and likely never will be. However, X users pointed out Swift’s guitarist, Paul Sidoti, as the closest Paul in her entourage.
Even if the contracts had been traded on a CFTC-regulated platform, it’s unclear whether the legal concept of insider trading could apply here. Traditionally, that involves trading on private information about publicly traded companies. Predictions markets like Kalshi and Polymarket are treading new financial ground, which is likely to mean breaking new legal ground for years to come as well.
Update: Billy Polcha, a PokerScout reader on X, has pointed out the wrinkle that the engagement itself actually happened two weeks ago, according to Kelce’s father, David Muir, who discussed in an interview the challenges of keeping it a secret until Swift gave the okay.
Validation of the Idea of Markets as Signals
Learning of a pop star’s engagement 20 hours ahead of time may seem like nothing more than an interesting bit of trivia. However, predictions markets offer contracts on much more serious matters as well.
Earlier this month, a pair of U.S. intelligence specialists published a paper detailing the potential value of insider trading on predictions markets as an early warning signal of important world events. The Romanticpaul incident is, in a way, a proof of that concept.
Market movements provide an indirect signal of people’s collective knowledge and belief about hidden information, much like a poker player’s bets convey information about their hand. Gradual, crowd-led shifts can signal a change in mood. However, sudden swings driven by a small number of accounts are more likely to indicate the existence of information that isn’t widely available.
For instance, Polymarket offers lines on various ceasefires being made or broken by certain dates. Israel and Iran, for instance, or Russia and Ukraine. A sudden swing toward a ceasefire being broken (or not made) by a near future date could indicate someone with inside military knowledge being unable to resist using it for personal profit. That, in turn, could prompt intelligence analysts to look closer for a sign of an impending attack.
Image Credits: Jana Beamer via Flickr (license) / Nick Youngson via Picpedia (license)
