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Posted November 20, 2025 at 2:10 pm
Join Jose Torres as he sits down with Michael Larson (The Money Show), Harry Figgie and Denton Jones (Greenwich Wealth Management), Jeff Zipper (Fifth Third Private Bank), and Vincent Randazzo (View Wright Advisors) to explore how wealth managers use forecast contracts in today’s markets. Hear expert insights on trading strategies, prediction markets, and portfolio positioning from some of the industry’s most trusted voices.
The following is a summary of a live audio recording and may contain errors in spelling or grammar. Although IBKR has edited for clarity no material changes have been made.
Hello everyone, and welcome to this second edition of The Forecast Trader Round Table. I’m Jose Torres, Senior Economist here at Interactive Brokers, and I’m joined by some great guests next to me. First, we have Michael Larson, the Vice President and Editor-in-Chief at The Money Show. Hi Mike.
Hi, Jose. How you doing?
Doing great. Thanks for being here with us.
Appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.
We also have Harry Figgie and Denton Jones, Partner and Head Portfolio Strategist at Greenwich Wealth Management (GWM). How are you doing, gentlemen?
Harry Figgie & Denton Jones
Doing great. Thank you, Jose, and excited to be here with you.
Terrific. We also have Jeff Zipper. He’s the Senior Vice President and Senior Portfolio Manager at Fifth Third Private Bank. Jeff, thanks for being here. How’s it going?
Going great. Thanks, Jose. Glad to be here.
Glad to have you here as well, Jeff. We have Vince Randazzo. He is the Founder and Chief Market Strategist at View Wright Advisors, formerly of CFRA Research. He’s a CMT, widely followed, but his camera is not working today because he’s on it too much. So we’re just gonna have his headshot in and listen to his ideas. He’s also the only person besides myself who’s joining us for the second time—he was featured in the first round table. Vince, how’s it going?
I am great, Jose. Thanks for having me back, man. This is a lot of fun.
Terrific. Terrific. So it’s been a long few days, folks, in prediction market world. We just had a big Election Day yesterday, November 4th. We had year-to-date record volumes and trading—12.68 million. Today, Wednesday the fifth, we’re up to roughly 7 million or so with a few hours to go. We are taping this on November 5th. Monday we had 4.1 million contracts traded. The weekend was very active as well. The most important contract from a transaction perspective has been the Momani versus Cuomo mayoral race in New York City, as well as the governorship races in Virginia and New Jersey. Our prediction market essentially did its job the same way it did during the 2024 presidential election. It pointed to a Trump victory last year. This year, it pointed to a Democratic sweep across those three elections that I just mentioned, as well as Proposition 50 for California.
Also, an interesting dynamic that occurred for next year’s elections for 2026 is that the Democrats are now favored to gain a majority in the House of Representatives. That shifted from 58%—so they were favored, but now they’re even more favored—from 58% up to 69% today. That’s, of course, due to the momentum from the elections, but also Proposition 50, which shifts some of those congressional districts in California toward the Democratic tilt.
Now, that’s really what’s been happening recently in forecast contract world. But I’m surrounded by market experts, wealth management professionals, and they’re gonna be talking to us—not necessarily about elections, although of course you can if you’d like. They’re gonna be talking to us a little bit about the asset classes that they like and how they relate to forecast contracts, which positions they’re thinking about opening up or they think are undervalued or overvalued, what kind of techniques they use when they’re engaging with the forecast trader, etc. As you all know, this has been a huge growth driver for the firm. Over 8,000 instruments listed, growth rates have been terrific—quarter over quarter above 100%. So we’re looking forward to hearing from market experts, and we’re gonna get started with Greenwich Wealth Management, Harry Figgie and Denton Jones.
Sure. Thank you, Jose. I’ll give a little bit of an introduction first, and then I’ll kick it over to Denton and then fill in some pieces. So, Greenwich Wealth Management—we’re, you know, a medium-sized registered investment advisor and do the traditional wealth management apparatus for a national client base, even though it’s concentrated kind of in the Northeast. Interactive Brokers is our primary custodian, and through that we got interested in learning more about prediction markets—how they work, how we can use them, will they be viable investments not only personally, but for potentially clients, and how does that fit into portfolios?
So about a year and a half ago we became very active in trying to understand and participate in prediction markets. In general, we’ve kind of taken a two-pronged approach: one is a very sort of systematic trading type approach, and the other one is trying to identify where we see value. Denton has been leading the charge with modeling and sourcing contracts where he believes there’s outsized value represented, and he’ll speak to that. I’ve been doing more of the systematic trading approach. Recently I’ve been favoring—let me walk that back for a second. Interactive Brokers has amazing trading tools. Two of those tools that we use quite frequently are Scale Trader and Accumulate Distribute. We’ve found both of these tools to be very effective for participating in prediction markets. Scale Trader allows you to pick a price and then buy or sell at certain levels. Accumulate Distribute helps you fill a position based on a period of time with some price constraints on it. I’ve been using—more recently—I’ve been taking long-dated index contracts and cryptocurrency contracts and trying to find fairly liquid sort of 50-delta positions. And then I use Scale Trader to short volatility on those. So I’ll buy the “Yes” on a lower strike, buy a “No” on a higher strike.
And then as there’s volatility in those positions, I’ll be either buying more “Yes,” which would reduce the “No” side, or buying more “No,” reducing the “Yes” side. What I’m trying to do there is: say you buy a contract at 50 cents, it trades down to 47—I might buy 150 cents, 100 at 49, 48, 47. Then I’ll sell out that contract on the opposite side at, say, 50, 51, 52 cents, and then just sort of rinse and repeat. So we’re trying to capture a little bit of the volatility on longer-dated contracts, book some profits, and then use the incentive coupons to supplement what are effectively cash holdings—trying to get sort of cash-plus returns out of systematically trading long-dated contracts. That’s where my focus has been. And then I’ll let Denton explain some of what he’s doing on the strategic positioning side.
Sure. So on the strategic positions, we look at a wide variety of markets—everything from individual economic statistics like natural gas production and unemployment rate, to some of the bigger markets like the House of Representatives trade and the New York City mayoral trade.
A lot of them have their own idiosyncrasies: some exhibit seasonality, some exhibit trends, some exhibit autocorrelation. So trying to find the right approach—or blend of approaches—for a given market has been how we’ve approached it, building a diversified portfolio of trades. Unlike financial markets that trade differently, these prediction markets can have really persistent patterns, and they’re not necessarily reflected in the price to the same extent that we see in more efficiently priced markets. That opens up a real opportunity. One trade we’ve been doing right now has been GDP. There we can have good leading indicators. For example, the GDPNow from the Atlanta Fed is a super popular one and has big disagreement with the pricing in the markets. It also has knock-on effects for other markets—for example, if GDPNow is saying the 50/50 weighted probability of this next GDP print is at 4%, but then the prediction markets are saying the 50/50 breakevens mark 3.1, that could indicate an opportunity. It could also say the odds of a recession—being two consecutive negative quarters—is basically non-existent, whereas there still is the ability to recession trade. So those are the kinds of things that we trade and do in relatively high size.
Another one that came up recently—or actually just yesterday—was on the House of Representatives trade before this big election. You could see inconsistent pricing, and that’s one of my favorite things to trade. Either, for example, Fed funds versus the Fed decision—highly correlated, they should perfectly price the same way. Sometimes they’re priced differently. So whenever you have a view, you can express it on the cheaper side of the trade.
But in this case, on the House of Representatives trade, placing a trade on “Yes” or “No” Republican, “Yes” or “No” Democrat—the exact same thing phrased differently could have a different price. So whether you’re entering on the cheap side, or if you have a wide enough spread, you can even take a hedge trade and you have no risk and just close the spread. We were able to do a trade like that just yesterday.
Thank you. Thank you, Harry and Denton. Let’s go to Jeff Zipper over in West Palm Beach.
Yep, you can see the backdrop behind me. So, not an expert on prediction markets, but I find the conversation really fascinating. One of the things that I would maybe get an answer from this group on, with respect to prediction markets, is what I’m hearing in my wheelhouse with private clients—high net worth, ultra-high net worth—two things going on: AI bubble, one; and two, maybe something for the prediction markets, and that would be tariffs front and center, Supreme Court. So if it is ruled against Trump and the tariffs do have to be reversed, what are the prediction markets saying about how equities would respond? Would that be negative for equities? Because if companies have to be reimbursed, will that increase debt and will that have rates blow out to the upside? Or will that benefit the companies that are importing goods and help their bottom line as they get refunded money? So I’d be interested after I finish what I have to say regarding what we’re seeing on AI bubble, etc., and equity markets. That would be really interesting—how equity markets respond.
So, there’s been a lot of talk about max seven artificial intelligence and even the companies outside the max seven as far as the AI trade, because you do have the market-cap-weighted index keeping this index afloat. We saw a little bit of a drawdown yesterday, but it does seem the market is in “buy the dip” mode and it’s still working. We’re still constructive to the upside, and here’s why: A couple of old sayings on Wall Street—don’t fight the Fed. So whether Powell and company lower rates in December or into 2026, they will be—the market’s pricing in 100 basis points lower 12 months from now. And the trend is your friend. So technically things still look pretty good.
Then you throw in earnings—double digits, profit margins—double digits. It’s all falling into place. And by the way, there’s still a lot of cash on the sidelines—six-plus trillion in cash on the sidelines. So you do have to take a close look at how low the Fed funds rate goes because that will impact money market rates. I think somewhere around a 3% area would probably push some of that money out of money markets into equities. So it would keep it going, but I wouldn’t be surprised at year-end if the S&P is over 7,000. Although under the surface, the breadth is not looking really good. In some sectors—equal weight, like consumer discretionary—you’re seeing earnings come out. In some companies, those companies are really getting hit pretty hard. On the market-cap-weighted side of the market, things still look good and they’ll look good until the trend breaks, which for right now still looks positive into year-end.
Thanks, Jeff. It looks like you could possibly be a buyer of the “Yes” contracts on the S&P that expire on December 31st. And a few other factors too—the year-end performance chase, of course the Trump put as well, has been really supportive for markets. Whenever you have a little bit of turbulence, something happens in Washington that restores investor sentiment. So thanks a lot for your contribution, Jeff.
Do you mind if I address him quickly?
Sure, sure. Harry, go for it.
Sure. So one of the things that, with a registered investment advisory firm, we struggle with some of the same issues, right? And that is portfolio management versus prediction markets. I think what I heard you saying there is you have some conviction—maybe high or at least some level of conviction—on certain data points, and the market may or may not respond to those. But what we’re trying to consider here at Greenwich Wealth Management is how do those two things fit inside a portfolio for high and ultra-high net worth individuals? So we might not know whether the market’s gonna go up, down, or sideways.
So maybe you want to buy a “Yes” on an index level. Maybe you want to increase client equity exposure. But if my thesis hinges on trusting the Fed dot plot, I can just buy a “Yes” on, you know, Fed Funds being a hundred basis points lower a year from now, right? And that way I know that’s going to be a profitable trade for me regardless if there’s some other idiosyncratic event or something else that derails interest rate markets or equity markets. So on some level, these things have a lot of correlation, but the beauty with prediction markets is you don’t need other securities to try to realize that thesis. Does that make sense?
Oh yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And you’re right—you can’t trust the dot plot. And you know, with the government shutdown, you’re gonna get data, some of that data’s gonna be stale when it comes out. And you know, Powell made it pretty clear that even December is far from a certainty. So we would like to think 12 months out that rates will be lower, but they may not be.
Right.
That’s where the contracts come in, and that’s why you’re… yeah.
You can position a portfolio for a thesis or not. You can leave it at whatever your target allocation is, let’s say, and then use prediction markets to either hedge or try to capitalize on a single data point. Knowing that, you know, there could be something else that happens. Maybe earnings are great and that should lead the S&P higher, but maybe earnings are great and then there’s some geopolitical event that sabotages the market. Well, if you were placing a prediction market—if you were buying a “Yes” on a prediction market for earnings over a certain level—then now you’ve profited there, even though there’s something else that disrupted the market.
So we think there is real opportunity to have traditional securities and prediction market-type securities within a broadly diversified client portfolio for high and ultra-high-net-worth individuals. We think that’s important, and that’s in part leading the effort that our firm is putting in. We want to make sure we’re at the forefront of these markets as opposed to trying to play catch-up on how to incorporate them and use them.
Right, right. And I agree a hundred percent. I mean, you brought up a word really important in my space, and that’s “hedge.” So if you think about prediction markets for, let’s say, any kind of traditional—not even gonna say 60/40, so it would be, you know, 60/30/10 now—but if you can allocate to a prediction market that is not even close to being correlated to any of those asset classes… You brought up the House of Representatives. To me, that would be a hedge on the rest of your asset classes, so it makes a lot of sense. Absolutely.
I’d like to go to Mike Larson of The Money Show here. Money Show—I’ll be talking on stage in Sarasota on Monday, December 1st at the Ritz-Carlton. I really enjoy The Money Show. It’s one of my favorite events because you really mix nerdy economics, financial market investing techniques with a really fun crowd. And you see a lot of the same people visit all the different shows across the country. So whether you’re in Sarasota or Miami or Las Vegas or Orlando—you know, I’ve been presenting at their shows for a few years now. And just every time I walk into an area or something, I know five or six people and I feel that warm welcome. So Mike, thanks so much for doing a great job at The Money Show, always considering us at Interactive Brokers. I know Steve Sosnick, our chief strategist, spoke at your Orlando show, and I’m looking forward to seeing you next month in Sarasota. What do you have for us on forecast contracts?
Sure, and absolutely—thanks for those kind words, Jose. We appreciate having you, your participation, and certainly having you on the podcast to talk about markets and what you’re seeing in the economy. I had my sort of remarks queued up here, but that conversation earlier about the ability to use prediction markets to distill one factor and have a “Yes” or “No” opinion expressed versus having to trade a thesis by using a second or third derivative of it is really interesting.
At my former employer, we used to have various publications that would recommend futures options and other stock option trades and index options trades and so on. And, you know, you could get the idea about inflation right. But if the market says, you know, if sentimentality is, “Oh, you know, the expectations of having a stronger inflation number,” and therefore you actually sell bonds or buy bonds on a strong number—I mean, all those things you had to factor in.
You could get the data right, but you could get the trade wrong. And that was probably one of the most frustrating things that would come up versus in a case like this, where again, do you think the Fed is going to cut 25 basis points in December? You can express that opinion directly without having to do it in a derivative fashion. And actually that’s kind of one of the interesting things. I mean, my overall thesis—you know, we obviously have guests that have their opinions, experts about the markets. I tend to try and set the stage at the beginning of each event with my macro overview and what I’m hearing from some of the people that we speak with.
I’ve had a “be bold” stance on the market really since the beginning of 2023. It was sort of the juxtaposition—before that it was more of a “be boring” approach for me, where you wanted to be playing things more defensively, especially given how ugly 2022 was for almost all assets—stocks, bonds, you name it. Whereas we definitely got out of that environment in 2023 and have been in a strong market ever since. There are questions, of course, swirling around out there about the AI situation. Is this dot-com bubble 2.0, or does this have more room to run? I tend to think it’s hard to see everything—the wheels come off the wagon—heading into year-end with strong seasonality. You know, I think that there’s probably still some momentum and strength to this trade. So apropos of what the other person mentioned, looking into year-end, something like a December contract—taking the “Yes” on the E-minis—I think you have different strikes you can use and so on. But an E-mini settle, March settle over 7K at the end of December—that was, I think, 48% earlier in terms of the “Yes” pricing when I looked at it. Something like that I think might be interesting. You look at some of the anti-dollar sort of non-correlated assets that I think have worked for a while and probably will continue to do so, whether it’s gold, whether it’s bitcoin on the latter.
I tend to be more of a real gold person in terms of what I am more bullish on, but I also understand the digital gold argument in this day and age. And you look at something—technically speaking—the way Bitcoin sort of flushed overnight under a hundred thousand today, and then reversed and then ran on an intraday basis. From a technical standpoint, have we let some of the air out of that market and now set the stage for a year-end rally? I think there is an argument and a case to be made there. So that’s something that, depending on what sort of price level you want to look at—I mean, you can look all the way up to 115. I think it was at 32% on the “Yes” this morning. So these are some of the things that I think fit into my worldview as we get here into the tail end of ’25.
Thanks, Mike. Appreciate it. And last but not least, Vince Rono.
Hey Jose, thanks again. Fun to be here—a lot of good conversation going on. Before I get into it, fun fact: Jeff Zipper and I—not only are we friends, we live down here in Palm Beach County—but we’re both Chartered Market Technicians. Now, he’s got other letters too—he’s a CFA and a CFP. So there are some very smart charters out there. Just want to let you guys know that.
Thank you. I forgot to mention that—I got right into it.
I think to add to Palm Beach County, I think Mike Larson is in Jupiter, Florida, but The Money Show is always traveling around, so I’m not sure where he is now. Where are you, Mike?
A little bit of a Where’s Waldo scenario. I am actually in Jupiter right now. I have a place here and also in Sarasota where The Money Show is headquartered, so I split my time.
Terrific. And despite Harry Figgie and Denton Jones being in Greenwich, Connecticut right now, their firm has an office in West Palm Beach, which is also in Palm Beach County. We’re all connected somehow.
Mike, I’m also in Jupiter, Mike. So we gotta get coffee—that’d be nice.
Good to me.
Rumor has it that there could be another wave of migrants coming south after the New York City mayoral election. But I won’t opine too much on that and let Vince go into his presentation.
Yeah, yeah. So, just last time I was on here a few weeks ago, I talked about the 7,000 for the S&P by year-end. So I think Mike and I are pretty aligned there. That was in the 30-cent range, I think, when I was on the call. So that’s gone up, so that’s been good so far. And I think we do—I think we do get there. I think it’s kind of interesting where we are. You can draw a lot of analogies—and not that I necessarily like drawing too many conclusions this way—but it’s really an interesting exercise if you consider what happened this year intrayear versus 1998 intrayear, where you had that really sharp news-driven sell-off at Long-Term Capital Management. You had a similar news-driven, sharp sell-off, really sharp recovery in both cases, and a lot of breadth that was behind it. Now we’re sort of seeing some floundering, of course. Breadth now is better than it was back then for sure. But I think that this all goes to say that this could go on for some time more. We don’t know how much more—obviously nobody does—but I think that there’s sort of an interesting way of saying that the bubble maybe is still expanding and we’re not quite there yet.
So maybe that’s kind of more to the point with a lot of the other guests were saying from a longer-term perspective. I think we look at the cycle and where we are and where we’re going compared to the average and median cycle lengths, and it seems like we’re somewhere in the later innings, right? And that means that next year, at least according to our work, the cycle could be vulnerable. And at the same time, though it’s not really part of our approach, it’s important to recognize that 2026 is a midterm election year, right? And midterm election years are historically the most volatile of the four-year presidential cycle for the stock market. I think the average intrayear decline in midterm election years is about 20% compared to about 13% in the other three years of presidential election cycles. So it’s just something to be aware of.
And of course, you look at the last few cycles we had—this was the case, right? 2022 was the last one, 2018 before that, 2010, and of course in 2002. Those were all quite painful in the sense that you had really deep drawdowns there. Not that this is a forecast, but I think it’s just interesting. All this kind of goes to the point of, okay, we’re still inflating and we’re still in inflation mode. And I think we are—I like for this call, I like the June 30th, 2026 “Yes” 8,100 on the S&P. I think that one is really interesting, good value. And I think it kind of goes—if we do go anywhere near what we did in the late sort of late ’90s into that peak, we could see that pretty easily.
Well, thank you Vince, and thank you all for joining us. You heard today from Harry Figgie and Denton Jones of Greenwich Wealth Management, Mike Larson of The Money Show, Jeff Zipper of Fifth Third Private Bank, and Vince Rono of Viewpoint Advisors. Thank you all for joining us, and I look forward to seeing you at our next Forecast Trader Roundtable. Thank you all.
Thanks, Jose.
Thanks, guys.
Thank you.
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