TheChek News Flow

Fight over Hezbollah cease-fire highlights unease over the prediction market’s arbitration system

Garrick Wilhelm joined the crowds piling into prediction markets last month. He quickly came to regret it.

The British Columbia resident signed up for Polymarket and began wagering on events in the Middle East. One available bet was on whether Israel and Hezbollah would reach a cease-fire. Wilhelm put down $567, reasoning that the militant group would never agree to such a deal. “It seemed like a no-brainer,” he said.

When Israel reached a truce with the Lebanese government, though, some traders argued that it counted as a deal with Hezbollah. Wilhelm, reading the rules carefully, disagreed.

With millions of dollars at stake, it wasn’t Polymarket that decided who was right. Instead, Wilhelm learned that the fate of his bet was up to a loosely organized body of cryptocurrency holders empowered to arbitrate such disputes.

Disputed bets are a growing headache for prediction markets, including Polymarket, as they contend with a surge of new traders and dizzying growth in trading volume. The platforms aim to write clear yes-or-no questions for traders to wager on. But the messiness of real-world events means it isn’t always obvious which side was right.

Most prediction-market firms, such as Kalshi, sort out disputes and ambiguities themselves. But Polymarket outsources the task to a third-party service called UMA, which conducts votes when rival factions of traders disagree over who deserves a payout. The voters making such calls are holders of UMA’s digital tokens. The more tokens someone holds, the more weight their vote gets. Most voters are anonymous.

Polymarket “is not responsible for any disputes related to the resolution of any Contracts,” the platform states in its terms of use.

Many traders and crypto veterans say the UMA voting system is ripe for abuse. Nothing prevents the token holders from voting on disputed wagers in which they have a personal stake.

Over the past year, at least 60% of active UMA voters could be directly linked to Polymarket accounts, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Polymarket and blockchain data. In more than 300 disputes—or nearly one in five during that period—at least one UMA voter had a financial stake in the outcome of the Polymarket bet they were voting on.

UMA calls itself “decentralized.” But blockchain data shows a small group of token holders dominate votes. In most disputes, more than 50% of the votes are concentrated in the 10 largest wallets, the Journal’s analysis shows.

Nic Carter, founding partner of investment firm Castle Island Ventures, said Polymarket should stop what he describes as passing the buck for resolving disputes.

“That should be Polymarket’s responsibility, not some outsourced, third-party, mysterious, anonymous token holders,” Carter said.

Only 0.2% of Polymarket’s betting contracts trigger UMA votes, a spokeswoman for the company said. UMA “distributes resolution authority across a transparent, marketwide framework rather than vesting it in any single decision maker,” she added.

In a Q&A at Harvard Business School in March, Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan acknowledged that the dispute-resolution process was “messy.”

“There’s improvements coming soon,” Coplan said, without providing details. Polymarket has a data partnership with Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

Founded by two former Goldman Sachs traders, UMA is overseen by Risk Labs, a foundation registered in the Cayman Islands. James Fry, a spokesman for the foundation, said it had never seen any credible evidence of UMA manipulation.

“The complaints you’re hearing come from a small number of traders who lost money on their bets and are looking for someone to blame,” Fry said.

When disputes arise, UMA token holders debate how to resolve them on the social-media platform Discord, sharing links to support their arguments. UMA imposes a financial penalty on those who vote with the minority, a rule it says is aimed at pushing voters toward the correct outcome.

So far this year, more than 1,150 Polymarket bets have triggered disputes, surpassing the total for all of 2025, according to Betmoar, a trading terminal for the platform’s users.

Another recent dispute revolved around bets on whether the livestreamer Clavicular would announce that he and his partner were pregnant. He did, but critics said it wasn’t a “credible” announcement, as required by the contract’s rules. UMA ruled that it was indeed credible. Other fights have broken out over wagers on the Iran war.

In Polymarket’s early years, its own personnel resolved disputes, regulatory filings show. The platform started farming out the task to UMA in early 2022, when it reached a settlement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission over allegations that it had violated U.S. rules. Relying on a diffuse group of token holders bolstered Polymarket’s argument that it was an offshore platform outside the scope of U.S. regulation.

On rare occasions, Polymarket has overruled UMA’s decisions. It also routinely issues “clarifications” to betting contracts to avert potential disputes.

Wilhelm, the novice trader in British Columbia, ended up losing his bet. A lopsided majority of 87% of UMA tokens voted that Israel’s cease-fire with Lebanon covered Hezbollah. Wilhelm complained to token holders that the decision was wrong, but his arguments went nowhere.

He and other traders on the losing side created a Discord forum called “Whale Eaters,” where they discussed alleged manipulation by UMA heavyweights.

The disgruntled traders zeroed in on UMA.rocks, a startup that lets UMA holders pool their tokens and delegate their votes to a committee. UMA.rocks accounted for 8% of votes in recent disputes and some traders see it as a bellwether for how UMA as a whole will rule.

UMA.rocks founder Lancelot Chardonnet defended its record. “Many traders lose money on Polymarket because they do not read the rules properly and then blame UMA and UMA.rocks simply because we are an easy target,” Chardonnet said.

In late April, UMA.rocks fired a member of its voting committee—who goes by “Scout” on Discord—over allegations that he had previously engaged in market manipulation.

Contacted over Discord, Scout denied manipulating markets or trying to swing votes to reach blatantly wrong conclusions. But he acknowledged that he routinely placed bets in disputed Polymarket contracts while participating in UMA votes to resolve those same disputes.

Scout, who declined to give his name, argued that such trading benefited the market and helped UMA resolve disputes accurately. Voters without skin in the game spent “five minutes max” researching disputes, while voters like himself were financially motivated to find the best resolutions, he argued.

“You can either have traders with a conflict of interest, or morons with no conflict of interest,” he said. “There’s not really a good middle ground.”

Activist Elliott Builds Big Stake in Life-Science Tools Supplier Bio-Rad

Elliott also has a stake in German lab-equipment supplier Sartorius, where Bio-Rad is also an investor

Activist Elliott Investment Management has built a sizable stake in Bio-Rad Laboratories BIO 0.51%increase; green up pointing triangle and plans to push the supplier of life-science tools and diagnostics products to boost its underperforming stock price, according to people familiar with the matter.

Elliott is also a large investor in Sartorius SRT -3.06%decrease; red down pointing triangle, the German supplier of pharmaceutical and laboratory equipment that Bio-Rad has a strategic investment in, the people said. Sartorius serves makers of biologic drugs, which now dominate pharmaceuticals.

Bio-Rad’s investment in Sartorius is worth around $5 billion, not far from the size of Bio-Rad’s roughly $6.6 billion market value. Elliott believes Sartorius is a high-quality business with strong growth prospects, the people familiar with the matter said.

The exact size of Elliott’s stake in Bio-Rad as well as details of its plans couldn’t be learned.

Bio-Rad’s stock has dropped over 70% since trading at peak levels of over $800 a share in late 2021, during the Covid-19 pandemic. Its sales and profit have fallen, and it has underperformed peers. The stock closed Friday at $247.53.

Bio-Rad’s turnaround prospects and the value of its stake in Sartorius alone could make it an appealing target to potential buyers.

The company’s management has been forecasting 2026 operating margins of between 10% and 12%, significantly lower than in recent years and below those of its peers, which can be more than 30%.

Restructuring at some of the biggest pharmaceutical companies following the pandemic has challenged the industry for life-science tools and diagnostics products. Analysts see bright spots emerging, however, as biopharma companies spend more on research and development and dealmaking activity heats up.

Bio-Rad’s peers, including Thermo Fisher Scientific and Danaher, have spent tens of billions on acquisitions in recent years, while private-equity firms have also been more active. Blackstone and TPG last year struck a deal to acquire medical-diagnostics company Hologic for over $18 billion.

Hercules, Calif.-based Bio-Rad makes instruments and software used by hospitals, blood banks and medical laboratories. Its founding family holds majority voting power, which can make it harder for an activist to prompt change. However, Elliott has successfully taken on other controlled companies including Pinterest and data-center operator Switch.

Elliott, which manages around $80 billion in assets, has been active in the healthcare sector, with other recent investments including Charles River Laboratories—where it won board seats and management agreed to launch a strategic review before the CEO resigned—and contract drugmaker Catalent, which was sold.

The company’s popular, $599 Neo laptop is just one of dozens of Apple devices that use lower-performing processors

Apple uses chips with slight defects, like the A18 Pro with a 5-core graphics processor in the $599 MacBook Neo, for cheaper devices.

This strategy, which dates back to the A4 chip, allows Apple to save money, segment its product lineup, and gain market share.

The MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple is running low on leftover chips and has been forced to order new ones.

Apple AAPL 0.68%increase; green up pointing triangle, long revered for its premium-priced products, has managed to develop a booming business selling cheaper devices when most gadget makers are being hammered by rising costs.

One of its secrets: using chips with slight defects that might otherwise be thrown out.

The strategy is apparent in the technical minutiae of the newly released $599 MacBook Neo, which early data suggest is a hit with customers.

The chip powering the Neo is Apple’s A18 Pro, the same chip first used inside the iPhone 16 Pro two years ago, but with one key difference. The Neo version of the chip has a “5-core” graphics processor, one less than the version inside the 2024 iPhones, indicating that Apple was able to save some of the A18 Pro chips with a defective core for future use.

Defective cores can be disabled, leaving a chip that still functions perfectly well to power different, often cheaper devices—in this case an entry-level laptop instead of a top-of-the-line iPhone.

It is the latest example of Apple deploying a decades-old chip industry strategy to squeeze profits from lesser-performing processors by selling them like eggs, gas, diamonds or hotel rooms, segmented by good, better and best.

What began as a salvage operation for mobile silicon has evolved into a cornerstone of Apple’s design strategy, allowing it to segment its lineup with surgical precision, achieving efficiencies that smaller rivals struggle to match, analysts said.

“If you can take the stuff that doesn’t meet highest level specs and still use it, you can save money, scrap and time,” says Tim Culpan, a supply-chain analyst who has written about Apple’s Neo chip orders. “Also you can reach a lot more customers you might not otherwise be able to sell to.”

Apple has used its flexibility with its own silicon to develop lower-priced iPhones and computers, many of which have sold well. The Neo is so popular that Apple is running low on leftover chips and has been forced to order new ones, according to people familiar with its supply chain.

Repurposing chips is one of many ways Apple takes advantage of its formidable supply chain. Lately it has weaponized prices to attract new users. The Neo is cheap enough to poach potential Chromebook and PC users; the iPhone 17e, which also uses a “binned” chip, is cheap enough to attract Android users.

Rival device makers are struggling more than Apple with the surging price of memory and storage, making lower-end devices unprofitable to sell and enabling Apple to gain market share, according to research firms Counterpoint and IDC. Every new user of an Apple device is also a potential buyer of Apple’s higher-margin services, such as iCloud storage, and the App Store.

Since 2021, Apple has sold six of its A-series chips with one less GPU core in a cheaper device after the fully functional version first appeared in a more expensive iPhone, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of nearly 200 Apple documentation pages.

Apple sells more than 200 million iPhones a year. Even if a small percentage of smartphone chips don’t meet specifications, Apple still has millions to repurpose. The 17e uses chips that aren’t good enough for the iPhone 17. The iPhone Air uses chips that wouldn’t meet specifications for the more expensive 17 Pro.

Apple makes far fewer Macs, and the M-series chips that power them. Even so, two years after rolling out with MacBook Pros, M-Series chips that lack a GPU core are used in the cheaper iPad Air.

For older chips, Apple’s documentation pages don’t include detailed chip specifications, but people familiar with its practices say the strategy dates back to the first chip Apple designed, the A4, which powered the first iPad, then months later the iPhone 4, and after that the second-generation Apple TV box.

A4 chips that drew too much power weren’t well-suited for smartphones running on a battery, but worked just fine in the Apple TV plugged into an outlet, said people familiar with the products. Something similar happened with less efficient S7 chips, which ended up in the second-generation HomePod rather than the Apple Watch for which they were originally designed, these people said.

When Apple bought processors from suppliers like Intel or Samsung, it could pick the choicest chips they made. Now that Apple designs its own processors, it pays Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, or TSMC, to make silicon wafers filled with hundreds of chips, sometimes of varying quality.

Apple puts chips with more processing cores in devices with bigger displays and more storage to create higher-priced models.

And as it rolls out new chip designs, Apple repurposes its older chips for cheaper products. The A8 chip first appeared in 2014 in the iPhone 6, then in 2015’s iPad Mini and Apple TV, and finally in 2017 in the first HomePod.

Using chips in the Neo that might otherwise be tossed is one way Apple was able to deliver its first entry-level laptop.

Yet the Neo is so popular Apple is blowing through its supply of ultracheap binned chips and recently placed fresh orders for A18 Pro silicon specifically to keep Neo production going, according to people familiar with Apple’s supply chain.

That isn’t as easy as it used to be. Apple gets its most advanced chips from one supplier, TSMC, which is also struggling to meet voracious demand for artificial-intelligence chips.

“Apple no longer has the flexibility it once enjoyed, and the strain is starting to show,” said Ming-Chi Kuo, analyst with TF International Securities.

Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook said the company is facing chip shortages that are preventing it from meeting customer demand, especially for iPhones and increasingly for Macs. Apple’s website currently lists shipment times of one to two weeks for a new Neo.

April industrial output and retail sales growth slow as Iran crisis hits consumer confidence

China’s industrial output and retail sales growth slowed sharply last month while investment dropped as policymakers warned that geopolitical conflicts were creating a “severe” global economic environment.

Industrial production rose 4.1 per cent in April from a year earlier, official data showed on Monday, falling short of a Bloomberg poll of analysts that forecast a 6 per cent rise and last month’s figure of 5.7 per cent.

Retail sales were up 0.2 per cent year on year, little changed and lower than analyst forecasts of 2 per cent growth and last month’s 1.7 per cent.

Fixed-asset investment, meanwhile, fell 1.6 per cent between January and April, compared with a gain of 1.7 per cent the previous month and analyst forecasts of 1.7 per cent.

The gloomy economic picture offered one of the first signs that the conflict in Iran was beginning to hit China, which has sought to mitigate the impact of higher oil prices domestically through regulatory measures.

“The international environment was complex and severe, the spillover effects of geopolitical conflicts continued to emerge, global energy markets fluctuated at high levels, and the difficulty of world economic recovery increased,” said Fu Linghui, spokesperson and chief economist of the National Bureau of Statistics.

“China actively strengthened energy supply guarantees [and] implemented temporary price controls.”

China is still grappling with the years-long fallout of a prolonged property sector slowdown, which has hit household confidence and damped consumer demand. Policymakers have sought to offset the lost economic activity by investing in infrastructure and manufacturing.

A Moody’s Analytics report ahead of the release on Monday referred to “a sluggish domestic economy and subdued investor sentiment”.

Instead, state-owned enterprises have driven much of domestic spending while manufacturing growth, particularly in high-tech sectors, has undergirded industrial production.

Exports have also continued to expand rapidly in spite of US President Donald Trump’s trade war.

A truce between the two powers, which Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping agreed in October and affirmed last week on the US president’s two-day visit to Beijing, has helped prop up growth.

Fu of the NBS said the data showed China’s resilience but also noted that the economy was grappling with a “contradiction of strong supply and weak demand”.

“Some enterprises face operational difficulties, and the foundation for the economy’s continued stability and improvement still needs to be consolidated,” he said.

Yuhan Zhang, principal economist of the China Center at the Conference Board, said that retail sales growth in the first four months of the year pointed to weak household demand, with consumers concentrating spending on selective discretionary items such as phones rather than “broad-based consumption”.

Car purchases were down 10.6 per cent, home appliances declined 4 per cent lower and construction materials, an indicator for the property sector, shed 7.1 per cent.

“The divergence underscores a bifurcated consumption recovery: consumers remain willing to spend on smaller lifestyle and tech upgrades, but confidence in long-cycle, credit-intensive purchases tied to housing and income expectations remains subdued,” Zhang said.

He added that investment remained “state-oriented and manufacturing-centric rather than broad-based”.

- The intelligence could become a pretext for U.S. military action; Within the past month, Cuban officials have sought more drones and military equipment from Russia; Cuban intelligence officials are "trying to learn about how Iran has resisted US"

- Cuba has been acquiring attack drones of "varying capabilities" from Russia and Iran since 2023, and has stashed them in strategic locations across the island

- Cuba doesn't have the ability to close the Straits of Florida in the same way Iran has brought shipping to a standstill in the Strait of Hormuz.

- Converge study Part 1 data presented at ESTRO 2026 for stage 3 unresectable NSCLC treated with intratumoral JNJ-1900 (NBTXR3) radioenhancer plus concurrent chemoradiotherapy and durvalumab; early results show feasible, safe injection and promising initial efficacy in 7 patients: ORR 85.7% (6/7), CRR 57.1% (4/7), DCR 100.0% (7/7), with no progressive disease and response deepening over time suggesting potential durability.

- Internally, we are working on version 9 of our new foundation model, which is 1.5T params. This is substantially better in every way than v8: data curation, training recipe, size, etc. It is also optimized to run on a Blackwells. The public facing v4.2 is based on foundation model v8, trained on Hoppers, with significant shortfalls in training data quality, comprehensiveness and proportionality. It is also only 0.5T in size. The difference between Grok foundation model 8 and 9 is gigantic.