Goldman Sachs Tells Employees Some Prediction Bets Could Cost Them Their Jobs

Goldman Sachs has restricted employee use of Kalshi and Polymarket to sports and entertainment as prediction markets raise new compliance concerns.

Key Points:

Goldman Sachs employees may not trade prediction contracts tied to politics, interest rates or other market-sensitive events.

Repeated policy violations could result in dismissal, according to reporting on the bank’s internal memo.

The restrictions reflect wider concern that employees could use confidential information when wagering on real-world outcomes.

Goldman Prediction Rules

Goldman distributed the policy through an internal memo, directing employees away from contracts involving elections, monetary policy and other events that could affect financial markets, the Financial Times reported.

The bank did not impose a complete ban.

A person familiar with the policy told the newspaper that repeated breaches could lead to termination, while Reuters reported that Goldman prohibits event contracts that may create actual or perceived conflicts of interest.

The limits address the bank’s proximity to material nonpublic information, including details about clients, transactions and market conditions that could influence the outcome or pricing of prediction contracts.

Kalshi and Polymarket offer markets covering elections, economic data and the level of the S&P 500, which makes employee activity harder to separate from conventional trading controls.

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Kalshi Compliance Risks

Scrutiny intensified after traders appeared to profit from advance knowledge of major events, including three wallets that gained more than $630,000 before Nicolás Maduro was captured, according to blockchain tracker Lookonchain.

Nobel Peace Prize organizers also investigated a possible information leak after unusually successful wagers identified the eventual winner.

Both platforms have introduced rules against insider trading and market manipulation, but banks still face difficulty monitoring employee accounts and determining whether a wager relied on confidential information. That uncertainty matters as prediction markets attract institutional capital and move closer to traditional finance, with Kalshi reportedly seeking a $40 billion valuation and developing a block-trading operation.

Sports remain the main revenue source for both platforms, but their expansion into political and financial contracts has steadily changed the compliance equation.

Goldman’s new limits reflect that transition, as products once treated mainly as entertainment increasingly resemble event-based financial instruments subject to the same conflict and information risks as other trades.