Goldman Sachs just told its bankers the office pool on the next Fed chair is over. Sports bets stay. Everything else on Wall Street's radar is now a fireable offense.
You can still bet on the Super Bowl. You just can't bet on your own bank anymore. Goldman Sachs has rewritten its personal trading policy to bar employees from wagering on prediction markets tied to individual companies, elections, financial market performance, macroeconomic data releases or geopolitical events, according to a report from Bloomberg published July 9. Repeat violators face dismissal, and the firm reserves the right to claw back any winnings over $200 or redirect them to charity.
The timing isn't subtle. In May, federal prosecutors charged Michele Spagnuolo, a Google software engineer living in Switzerland, with using internal search data to place winning bets on Polymarket. According to the CFTC and Department of Justice, Spagnuolo wagered roughly $2.7 million across 25 separate contracts tied to Google's Year in Search rankings and walked away with $1.2 million in profit. He bet nearly $1 million that Kanye West's wife, Bianca Censori, would not be the year's most searched person, and more than $600,000 that Pope Leo XIV wouldn't top the list either. Both bets paid off. It was the first insider trading case ever brought against an event contract trader, and it landed exactly where Wall Street compliance departments live, in the space where a prediction market bet and a trade on material nonpublic information can look identical.
Frankly, Goldman had more reason than most to move fast. Its own employees work daily on live deals, earnings estimates and macro calls, the exact categories now barred. CNBC reported that among 50 companies it surveyed on the question, only three, Goldman, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America, had formalized rules on prediction market trading, and two more said the issue was under active review. Morgan Stanley's rules sit inside its employee code of conduct, though the firm hasn't detailed them publicly. Bank of America is still finalizing its own policy, with a list of prohibited activities and examples meant to close the kind of ambiguity that let Spagnuolo's bets look, on paper, like ordinary trading.
JPMorgan has taken the softer route. Guidance circulated to staff this spring urges caution rather than prohibition, telling employees to limit participation in prediction markets tied to JPMorgan itself because, in the bank's own words, others could perceive this as a misuse of information. There's no pre-clearance requirement, no dollar threshold, no dismissal clause. It's a memo, not a policy. That gap between Goldman's outright ban and JPMorgan's warning shows how unsettled this territory still is, even among banks with nearly identical compliance obligations.
The platforms themselves are trying to get ahead of it too. Kalshi announced new employment verification tools in early June and partnered with StarCompliance, the same vendor banks already use to monitor personal stock trading, so employers can see what their staff are betting on. Neither Kalshi nor Polymarket responded to requests for comment on Goldman's new policy, and Goldman itself declined to elaborate beyond what Bloomberg reported.
Here's the tension nobody at these firms wants to say out loud. Event contracts on Kalshi and Polymarket are regulated by the CFTC, the same agency that oversees oil futures and interest rate swaps. That classification is exactly what let them expand into election and macro betting where traditional sportsbooks can't operate. But it also means a bet on whether the Fed cuts rates in September sits in the same legal category as a bet on Sunday's football scores, and the people best positioned to know the answer are often the people sitting inside the banks and companies the contracts are about. Goldman's ban is an admission that the firm can't reliably tell the difference between an employee with a hunch and an employee with an edge, so it's removing the option entirely.
What happens next probably depends less on Goldman than on the CFTC. Spagnuolo's case was a civil and criminal first, not a settled body of law, and prosecutors haven't said whether other cases are already in the pipeline. Until they do, expect more banks to write their own rules rather than wait for regulators to write them first.
Also read: Kevin Warsh Just Put Marc Andreessen In The Room Where Fed Policy Gets Made • Gauntlet Just Landed Crypto's Biggest Single-Investor Bet From Japan's SBI • Bank of America extends OpenAI its first loan after months of saying no
