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This Week in Charts: Are Prediction Markets Politically Biased?

a16z News

Oct 9, 2026

10/9/2026

Prediction Markets Show Little Systematic Partisan Bias And May Aggregate Election Information Ahead Of Conventional Markets

This Week in Charts: Are Prediction Markets Politically Biased? · a16z News

Business, Finance & Industries · Oct 9, 2026

A preliminary NBER analysis of more than a century of prediction markets found no statistically meaningful partisan, gender, racial, or age bias in candidate pricing, with only a weak and insignificant tendency to overrate right-leaning candidates in non-U.S. elections. The markets may nevertheless aggregate useful information early, as illustrated by Flávio Bolsonaro becoming the Brazilian-election favorite weeks before winning and a subsequent rise in Brazil’s stock ETF.


10/9/2026

Global Call-Center Employment Turns Negative as AI Substitution Accelerates, Suggesting Occupational Displacement Ahead of Broad Unemployment

This Week in Charts: Are Prediction Markets Politically Biased? · a16z News

Business, Finance & Industries · Oct 9, 2026

Call-center employment has shifted from long-term growth to synchronized global decline, increasingly consistent with AI-driven occupational substitution even though broad economy-wide job losses remain limited.


10/9/2026

AI Capital Expenditure Concentrates Profit Growth In Physical Infrastructure Not Software, Narrowing The Range Of Beneficiaries

This Week in Charts: Are Prediction Markets Politically Biased? · a16z News

Business, Finance & Industries · Oct 9, 2026

AI investment is increasingly concentrating profit growth in physical infrastructure—especially energy, semiconductors, and hardware—while software and broader IT benefit less; rising industrial backlogs and accelerating AI-hardware shipments reinforce this shift.


10/9/2026

Rule of 40 No Longer Reliably Signals Software Valuation in a Growth-Focused Market.

This Week in Charts: Are Prediction Markets Politically Biased? · a16z News

Business, Finance & Industries · Oct 9, 2026

The Rule of 40 has become a weaker software valuation benchmark because its combined growth-and-profitability score obscures the fact that public markets now reward revenue growth far more than margins. Despite rising Rule of X scores, software revenue multiples fell, and premium valuations were concentrated among the fastest-growing companies, especially in cybersecurity and observability.