Australia's securities regulator ASIC said on 30 October, through its chair Sarah Court, that it is not currently convinced that prediction markets for retail clients are in the public interest. It considers the contracts to have all the features of a bet and compares them with binary options, banned for retail clients in Australia since 2021. It points to risks of misuse of confidential information, manipulation and disputes over how outcomes are decided. People using offshore platforms directly have no protection under Australian law, while licensed providers that facilitate access to them keep all their obligations.

What it means: ASIC's statement is one of the clearest positions any regulator has taken on prediction markets, which have grown explosively over the past year. It is not a formal ban, but a signal that an application to run such a market in Australia would face serious obstacles. The key question the regulator raises is whether contracts on the weather or sports results are really investment products or gambling under another name. The answer decides who supervises them and which protection rules apply. In Europe, ESMA and national authorities have already restricted binary options for retail clients, and the Australian reasoning, which links the two products, makes a similar stance more likely. In Greece, where gambling is supervised by the Hellenic Gaming Commission and requires a specific licence, a prediction platform targeting Greek users without one would face serious legal risk. For financial services firms, the point that facilitating access to foreign platforms does not remove their obligations is an important warning. Consumers should know that without a local licence they have practically nowhere to turn in a dispute.

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