Apple writes prediction markets into insider trading ban for staff

Apple updated its insider trading policy to include event contracts, extending a prohibition that previously covered only securities to anyone who might carry company information onto platforms like Kalshi or Polymarket.

The revision arrived in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The previous version of the policy, dated September 2024, contained no reference to prediction markets. The new one does, and the expansion matters for a reason Apple did not need to spell out: combined taker volume across Kalshi and Polymarket's venues reached $172.4 billion in the third quarter alone, up from $98.5 billion the quarter before. These are not marginal platforms anymore.

The policy covers directors, officers, employees, contractors, consultants, and family members sharing a household with any of them. The prohibited category is Apple Confidential Information — which includes material nonpublic information but is not limited to it. Staff may not bet on event contracts using that information, and they may not pass it to someone else who does. The rule applies, the policy states explicitly, whether or not the activity constitutes insider trading under applicable law. That last clause is deliberate. Apple is not waiting for a court to draw the line.

The breadth is what distinguishes this from what other companies have done. Seagate named Kalshi and Polymarket directly but confined the ban to bets about Seagate itself. GoDaddy addressed prediction markets in its proxy statement. Apple's scope runs further: it reaches information about suppliers, manufacturers, vendors, and cellular network carriers — anything an Apple employee learns at Apple about any company they touch. A procurement officer who knows a component shortage is coming cannot take that onto a Polymarket commodities contract. A carrier relations executive cannot trade an economic benchmark that moves on supply chain data she helped generate.

The CFTC enforcement director named prediction market insider trading as the agency's first priority in March. Apple's legal team will have read that signal. What corporate counsel learns from a priority list like that is not what conduct is already prohibited — it is what conduct is about to be prosecuted. The policy revision is a hedge against the moment a staffer with nonpublic information makes a trade that the CFTC decides to pursue, and Apple is standing in the room without a written rule.

The case that made this unavoidable happened earlier this year, when a Polymarket user allegedly cleared more than a million dollars betting on Google's Year in Search rankings using information that was not public. That case did not involve Apple. It did not need to. It established that the gap between "not illegal under securities law" and "not prosecutable under CFTC authority" is narrower than most corporate compliance teams had assumed.