You are not mistaken. Top trading firms like DRW and Susquehanna are hiring on a large scale, with annual salaries starting at $200,000, aiming to enter the prediction market, which was once a playground for retail investors. What does this turning point indicate? It shows that the pool has grown large enough to accommodate institutional funds.

Numbers are the most convincing. The monthly trading volume of prediction markets was around $100 million at the beginning of last year, but by December it had surpassed $8 billion, and in January, it even broke $700 million in a single day. With money at this level, Wall Street's entry is no longer a choice but an inevitability.

But their approach is completely different from retail traders. Retail traders rely on fragmented information and intuition, essentially gambling; institutions, on the other hand, employ PhD teams and algorithmic models to execute a form of dimensionality reduction attack. The focus is not on predicting individual events but on cross-platform arbitrage and discovering market pricing flaws.

For example, in practice: on Polymarket, the probability quote for a certain economic indicator is 50%, but the credit market prices it at only 2%. The institutional strategy is to predict the market by buying the opposite position at a low price and simultaneously shorting in the credit market—regardless of the final outcome, the spread between the two is locked in. Prediction markets have transformed from gambling tools into precise risk hedging instruments.

What does this mean for retail investors? The days when they could rely on information asymmetry and price differences between platforms may truly be coming to an end. As institutions use scientific pricing models to fill market gaps, the advantage space for retail traders will be gradually squeezed.