Frenchman who saw through pollsters' failure and media's skew makes fortune betting on Trump

A mystery trader identifying himself only as Thèo secured an estimated $48 million in profits betting that the 45th president would be elected the 47th president.

The trader, a Frenchman with a financial services background who has been dubbed the "Trump whale," reportedly used four anonymous accounts — Theo4, Fredi9999, PrincessCaro and Michieon — on the crypto-based betting site Polymarket to bet on President Donald Trump to win the popular vote as well as most battleground states.

Thèo suspected that establishment pollsters and the mainstream media had overestimated support for Kamala Harris and once again underestimated Trump's support.

Thèo told Visegrád 24 prior to Election Day, "The polls are really different from the predictive odds in the predictive markets. It calculates something totally different. One is calculating what are the intentions of the people to vote. The other are bets made by real people with real money about who they believe the winner will be."

The Frenchman noted in August, he began to realize that "media outlets are making the same mistakes they made in 2016 and 2020 underestimating the Trump vote. Why? Because, again, it's underestimating the shy Trump vote effect."

The Princeton Election Consortium indicated, for example, in November 2016 that Hillary Clinton had a 99% chance of beating Trump, projecting her to take 312 electoral votes. FiveThirtyEight, then Nate Silver's polling outfit, suggested that Clinton's had a 71.4% chance of winning. Polls conducted that year by the Washington Post, ABC News, Google Consumer Surveys, Ipsos, YouGov, Fox News, Selzer & Company, and other outfits were similarly way off the mark, all putting Clinton ahead by several points.

Thèo indicated that this time around, the New York Times/Siena College polls and others were making the same mistakes, noting that in one instance, a poll showing Harris ahead by 2 percentage points in North Carolina was actually "un-representative by 9.3 percentage points."

'Don't trust the mainstream media.'

Prior to Election Day, Thèo told a reporter at the Wall Street Journal who had taken an interest in the trader's enormous bets that RealClearPolitics polling averages showed Trump outdoing his swing-state polling numbers in the previous presidential election, which was particularly close.

Recognizing that the races would again be close in swing states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and factoring in the "shy Trump voter effect" — which the mainstream polling outfits apparently neglected to account for — the trader realized the Republican had upwards of a 90% chance of winning the day and a 65% chance of winning the popular vote.

The Frenchman took the addition step of commissioning a major pollster to conduct surveys to measure the "neighbor effect" stateside. Thèo noted that while the shy voter effect undermined the reliability of normal polls, neighbor polls — where respondents are asked which candidates their neighbors would likely support — would provide a better indication of voter preferences.

Thèo told the Journal that the results "were mind blowing to the favor of Trump!"

"Public opinion would have been better prepared if the latest polls had measured that neighbor effect," he added.

Bloomberg indicated that Polymarket bets on which candidate would become the 47th president produced almost $3.7 billion in volume this cycle.

Polymarket released a statement Wednesday morning, noting, "Last night, Polymarket proved the wisdom of markets over the polls, the media, and the pundits. Polymarket consistently and accurately forecasted outcomes well ahead of all three, demonstrating the power of high volume, deeply liquid prediction markets like those pioneered by Polymarket."

The company later shared a screenshot of an Oct. 22 Time magazine headline that read, "Don't Trust the Political Prediction Markets," commenting, "Don't trust the mainstream media."

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