Political junkies can capture a piece of that action over at PredictIt, a prediction market launched by the Victoria University of Wellington as an academic research project and regulated by the CFTC.
Place Your Bet: How Many Times Will Trump Tweet About the Mueller Report?
The market is fairly straightforward: “How many @realDonaldTrump tweets mention ‘Mueller’ [between] noon 4/16 – noon 4/23?”
The rules are also simple. Qualifying tweets must include the letter string m-u-e-l-l-e-r. Trump does not have to be the original author, so retweets count.
There is one crucial caveat. The tweets only qualify if “Mueller” is spelled correctly, which is a critical factor for bettors to remember given that Trump doesn’t always run his posts through Grammarly before he hits “Tweet.”
After all, he is the president who introduced us to covfefe.
Donald Trump’s disdain for proofreading could prevent unlucky gamblers from reaping a windfall. | Source: Twitter
Bettors Expect POTUS to Unleash an Avalanche of Mueller Report Tweets
Shockingly, the Trump tweet ticker stood at 0 as of the time of writing at roughly 1 pm ET on Thursday.
While Trump had unleashed a major tweetstorm about the Mueller investigation ahead of the report’s release on Thursday morning, not a single one of those tweets actually included the word “Mueller.”
Here’s one example, which clearly alludes to the probe but fails to reference it directly.
No Collusion – No Obstruction! pic.twitter.com/diggF8V3hl
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 18, 2019
Even so, gamblers remain bullish that the president will release an avalanche of Mueller-related jabs between now and when the market closes on April 23.
To wit: “9 or more tweets” is by far the most popular bet, with shares currently priced at 28 cents (shares trade on a scale of 1 cent to 99 cents; the winning shares pay out at $1.00).
A plurality of bettors expect Trump to reference “Mueller” nine or more times between now and next Tuesday. | Source: PredictIt
No other bet has traded above 12 cents, and speculators can pick up both “0 tweets” and “1 tweet” for just 4 cents, or 25:1 odds.
As for me, I’m not much of a gambler – but I’ll take the over.