Invictus

How to play Invictus

While it’s tempting to use AI to help you write a submit, we please ask that you avoid doing so, as once again, the more personal an entry is, the better we can judge it across our key criteria.

The submission form will close on 1 October, at which time nominations will be put to our esteemed panel of judges for final review.

More information on judges, submissions and deadlines can be found here. You can also access interviews with last year’s winners and the final list for 2025, as well as for every year prior.

About Invictus

This process of dumping nearly $1 trillion into the U.S. banking system has already begun. How is it going to work? There is currently a $1.5 trillion short term bill hamster wheel that the U.S. Treasury has been running on like a crazed mouse since April. They issue about $1.5 trillion in short term paper every month and pay it back with about the same in new short term issuance. They have about $1.6 trillion stuck in their bank account at the Federal Reserve, and that money is now coming out to pay down that hamster wheel. The issuance of new short term paper is slowing down. All this new money is going to stuff banks so full of short term cash that they will be forced to slam it into the existing supply of short term paper to such an extent that the rates are going to go negative, nominally. Nobody knows how deeply, but it’s definitely coming, probably in the next few days.

Below is the graph of 1-month rates from CNBC. They are about to cross the zero boundary.

When that happens, commodities prices are going to get completely unhinged. The cash on corporate balance sheets is going to start losing purchasing power very fast. And that will only encourage more dumping of it, and increase the positive feedback loop now already in place.

How to play Invictus

At the same time, prediction market operators are facing regulatory tussles in the US. State regulators are moving to shut down the firms under gambling laws. The companies say their contracts should be regulated at the federal level as derivatives. 

However, the sector has grown substantially despite such disputes. Bernstein predicted in April that annual prediction market volume could reach $1 trillion by 2030. The research estimated volume was around $51 billion in 2025 and could grow to around $240 billion in 2026. 

The partnership with Yahoo Finance wraps up as prediction markets push for broader distribution across financial media, sports, and entertainment platforms. For Polymarket, the loss of the Yahoo Finance hub is one distribution channel, but other partnerships remain intact.