Allison Schrager, Columnist

Prediction Markets Shouldn’t Be So Easy to Play

March 6, 2026 at 10:30 AM UTC

Allison Schrager is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering economics. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, she is author of “An Economist Walks Into a Brothel: And Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk.”

Rolling the dice.
Illustration: 731; United Archives, DjelicS and Albert photo via Getty Images

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A great financial economist once tried to convince me that retail investors should not be allowed to buy individual stocks. I strenuously disagreed: Wasn’t this America, the country that encourages risk-taking? Why shut regular investors out of the chance to get rich?

I have now come to realize that he has a point. Most people don’t know what they are doing. Buying individual shares, as this professor argued, is like buying a spark plug for a car; it is only useful as a part of a whole, in this case a diversified portfolio. Most retail stock-pickers will underperform the market.