Sarah Jessica Parker gave a commencement speech this June, and a prediction market asked whether she'd say one word: "president." Nando Di Fino bought it at about 12 cents. He didn't need a model. He had read the one earlier speech of hers he could find, and he knew how a speaker opens when she's addressing a university.
That's the style of trading Nando brings to The 7 Oracles, the prediction market newsletter and YouTube channel he co-founded after years in fantasy sports media. His edge comes from knowing how Rotten Tomatoes scores arrive in bunches, how a Trump press conference differs from a teleprompter speech, and how a long shot behaves once a story catches fire.
Brian Hartman sat down with Nando on The Prediction Market Show to find out how a fantasy veteran ended up trading movies, reality TV and speeches, what carries over from fantasy sports and what doesn't, the mistake that taught him to treat speeches and press conferences differently, and why he thinks about the sale before he buys.
Watch and Listen to The Interview Above - Read Below
From Fantasy Sports to Everything Else
Brian: What got you interested in prediction markets after spending so much time in fantasy sports?
Nando: "I've been in fantasy long enough to remember the Legal Sports Report days, when DFS was blowing up. I read everything Dustin Gouker puts out, and I signed up for his Event Horizon newsletter a while ago. When he started mentioning prediction markets, right when it all started, it completely piqued my interest.
"It's just a lot more fun. I feel like there are fewer ways for me to lose, because you can pull out of a market early. I love that. I'll look at a sports team and think, I believe they're going to compete well, but do they finish the job? I don't know, but I'll start the bet anyway. I might not finish it myself."
Brian: Was politics the first market that really hooked you?
Nando: "Oh yeah. I thought it was the coolest thing. I worked in media for a while, including at Court TV, and the politics always crossed over there. Right now I have a bunch of Andy Beshear shares at around 3.5 cents, because I know he's going to have one good debate. It's a wide-open field on that side. He has one good debate and it goes from 3 cents to 14, and then the papers ask, could he be the next Bill Clinton? You start to see how it could be 50 cents after one debate.
"If you know how media cycles work, how people's brains work, and the wisdom of the crowds, you can do real things with it. I love Survivor, and doing a Survivor market was a giant mistake, I know now. But I'm not even touching sports. I'm doing everything else. It's like a playground."
Nando: "I do a decent amount of TV and movie content. Me, my brother and my wife were all watching Big Brother, and all of a sudden I'm thinking, wait a second, there are markets for this? There are so many edges to be had. If you have knowledge in those niche markets, why wouldn't you dig into it?"
Brian: When we explain this to people, we say you're monetizing your hobby. You have interests you can actually make money off instead of just enjoying them.
Nando: "My mom for the longest time called me six and a half feet of useless knowledge. Now I have somewhere to put it. Guess what, mom, look at this graph."
Turning It Into a Business
Brian: At what point did you start thinking there was a business in this?
Nando: "I know exactly where it was on the calendar. It was right around February this year, when the big platforms kept announcing rounds at bigger and bigger valuations. We went through this with DFS, and we went through it with betting. The companies are taking in this much money, they're valued at this much, and the next move was always content.
"So I grabbed some of the guys I've loved working with over the years and said, why don't we start a newsletter and a YouTube channel? One of our guys was already building the website, so we combined forces. We figured, let's get ahead of this because it's fun, and see what happens. We were confident people would like it. It followed the same trend as those DFS and betting lines, where they're going to need content at some point."
Who The 7 Oracles Is For
Brian: Who are you making this for?
Nando: "Each medium is its own little thing. I'm a student of Marshall McLuhan. The newsletter is for, I hate to say retail, but normal people who want to jump in, who might not know a ton about it, who are just into interesting stuff. Our edges aren't quant edges. Our edge is that I know how media works.
"Take a film from a while back. The first 13 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, and nobody had found a flaw with it. Everybody was in love with it. At 3 cents, you could buy Best Picture. I knew that when it came out in a couple of weeks, people would jump all over it. Someone would write a story, Variety would call it a Best Picture nominee, and the price would go up. Then you sell, and keep a hundred of them to see if it actually happens. That's the kind of thing we do in the newsletter.
"On YouTube, we've had a lot of success with Survivor, Dancing With the Stars and Big Brother for the regular videos. The shorts have been sports, and sports have gotten the best reaction. So we're kind of all over the place. And one of our guys built this insane website. We've got a little something for everybody. We just have the entry points ready, wherever you find us and wherever you are in your prediction markets journey. It's more like opening doors and saying, check this out."
Reading Media Cycles
Brian: It sounds like instead of building an analytical database, you're playing on emotion. You're reading the public movement.
Nando: "I know it sounds lazy. It's not. My way of quantifying it is that I know media cycles. I know when a story is going to happen. It's inside information without having inside information. It's just having the experience.
"Take how Rotten Tomatoes works. Reviews come in bunches, and if you read reviews that aren't part of the Tomatometer yet, you have an advantage, because they're going to show up and move the score. The Odyssey was riding high at a 95, I think, and then the backlash started and some negative reviews came in. I even read one review that was listed as negative. The headline was negative, but if you read it, it's closer to a 2.5 than a 2. Our edge is finding these People magazine type markets, where we know how it's going to play out and how prices are going to rise or fall."
Brian: I like that, because you can't build an AI model to beat you. There aren't numbers to lean on.
Nando: "It's old-fashioned Greek knowledge. We're running this on tablets. It's just knowing people. And the flip side is that one of our guys built the other side of our brain. He's not a numbers dude, but he's coded AI tools that have been right and get refined every day. We've merged the two almost seamlessly, with a lot of knowledge and history from being around gray beards, plus the coded side. You've got to have fun, right? It's supposed to be fun, and we're working with guys we like."
What Carries Over From Fantasy Sports
Brian: What carries over from your fantasy analysis, and what doesn't?
Nando: "It's looking at certain things a certain way. As fantasy got bigger and bigger, it used to be targets. Now it's metric after metric, and you're missing the forest for the trees. You make these coefficients that are cool, but I don't think they help someone as much as rushing attempts do. I've dialed it back. There's some simplicity in our analysis. In one newsletter, we grabbed a guy from Kansas to talk about what it's like there for their Senate race. We looked at things that have actually worked before, like polls versus whatever.
"If you're doing the same thing as everyone else with the same data, that's pointless. It's fun to look at, but if you're trying to apply it to a market, you're using the same rankings as everybody else and it's not going to help you. We've tried to get out of the groupthink mentality, which is kind of easy here because there's no real groupthink yet. There's a graph, you can see the history, you can see where it's trending, and that's as close as we get. There aren't ESPN guys for this. There aren't CBS guys for this."
Brian: It reminds me of when Best Ball came on the scene. We didn't have content made for it, we didn't know the rules, and we just jumped in and had fun.
Nando: "I think that's the approach most people should have with prediction markets too. You've got to play some seasons. With fantasy, you listen to the experts. With betting it was looser, and you could read beat writers and pick something up. Here, if you read Entertainment Weekly, you've got an edge on some of these."
Brian: What's a fantasy habit that can get you in trouble over here?
Nando: "Following the crowd. And maybe, not to get too meta, playing fantasy on the markets. Use the markets for the other fun stuff you enjoy. If you're going to play with props, do it on the market, where you can sell. If it's looking good, sell at 85 cents. You don't have to wait. Don't ignore that."
If selling before settlement is new to you, our Prediction Markets 101 covers how pricing and exits work.
Brian: Is there a fantasy habit you'd tell people to keep out of their markets? Maybe not doubling down on the player who's burning you in your lineup?
Nando: "We actually have a term for this: hedge your happiness. If you have Jaylen Waddle on your fantasy team, hedge on the markets. Go under and see what happens. You won't go down to zero, and if he's having a great day, you just get out at 12 cents. You can hedge the angst of your fantasy team on the markets, as long as you're smart about what you're playing with."
Brian: I'm famous for that with my brothers and my buddies. There's no bigger Tom Brady hater in the world, and I bet on him to win everything, because no matter what, I win.
Nando: "That's it. If you want the Democrats to sweep everything, put $20 on the 8% Republicans to win the House. If you wake up Wednesday and things don't go your way, you still have some money. You can buy a little bit of happiness."
The Sarah Jessica Parker Trade
Brian: Can you walk me through a market that caught your attention and how you evaluated it?
Nando: "I'll go obscure. Sarah Jessica Parker was going to give the commencement address at Northwestern, and she'd only given a speech one other time, at Harvard Law School, I think. You read through that one and catch what she's saying, and you figure she'll use some similar themes. The world has changed a little, but it wasn't overtly political. It was chase your dreams, do whatever you want, here's a story. A little milquetoast, honestly.
"There was a market on it, and they had a lot of political words. One of them was 'president.' I went back and looked at her earlier speech, and she's addressing the president of the university. The market was built so that it was President Trump, but if she says 'president,' you win. It doesn't have to be President Trump. Of course she's going to say, dear fellow graduates, dear President whatever your name is. The odds were low because people figured she wasn't going to be political.
"Afterward there were stories about the speech. She basically used the same one with minor tweaks, and she addressed the president right off the bat. I think I was on that at about 12 cents. If you run a thousand simulations in your brain of how this speech is going to go, of course she says 'president.' You're not manipulating the market. It's a different way of thinking about what you're actually buying."
Brian: Nobody in that room knew you were comparing it to the first speech.
Nando: "I didn't know there would be a transcript of Sarah Jessica Parker's Harvard Law commencement speech, but there was. This is what I use AI for, to find that. I don't go overboard with it. I make dumb posters, and I find transcripts of speeches.
"The Trump mentions are my all-time favorite, and I'm about 50-50 on a lot of them. Sometimes I look like a genius, because of course he's going to say 'moon' on the day we sent the shuttle around the moon. I thought for sure he'd mention artificial intelligence in his last few, because he's on the superintelligence kick, but he hasn't. I've got to tweak my brain's algorithm."
Speeches Versus Press Conferences
Brian: Where did a read just not work out, or where did you have to change your mind?
Nando: "It was probably the Trump mentions, which are some of the most fun things ever. I found out very quickly, and I should have known this, and it was my own fault: a Trump press conference and a Trump speech are two very different things.
"If Trump's giving a speech at 9:00 tonight and NBC, CBS and ABC are carrying it, that's him reading off a teleprompter. Think of it as a speechwriter wrote it and he's going to read it. There's not a lot of off the cuff. Trump press conferences, when he's taking questions, are different. Any word you can think of is in play.
"I was watching one live, and it was almost over. He said he'd take one more question, and the reporter asked something completely unrelated. He somehow brought it back to Biden. I had Biden at 3 cents because it was the end of the conference and I figured he wasn't going to mention it. You can take that weird shot in press conferences, but not on speeches. He'll extend something for 15 minutes and you'll watch the stream of consciousness somehow get you to the word potato. Or banana. Then it hits at 1 cent.
"If you're watching live with ten minutes left, you can pick every 1-cent word that everyone's given up on. It all has a shot. It's crazy."
Brian: So you've shaped your approach around the press conference, versus the speeches where he's reading off the teleprompter.
Nando: "Yeah. We thought we had some hits with the Correspondents' Dinner. We didn't realize he was going to have a bunch of scripted jokes and rip on the joke writers while reading them anyway. Our thing was that he'd be Trump and make Trump jokes. Instead he was Trump making corny, scripted presidential jokes. We weren't ready for that one. It's still so much fun, though. You just watch something for an hour with it on in the background and wonder, did he say it? Did he say it?"
Making Prediction Market Content
Brian: What have you learned about making prediction market content entertaining and useful? We're working on that here at PredictQ with a live show and interviews.
Nando: "We're still learning. You have to get over the hurdle that people don't know what this is yet. Don't get discouraged if the numbers are low. If engagement is high, if people are watching for a long time, if someone texts you that was a great newsletter today, those are the signs. I've worked on newsletters that have been giant, and ours is trying to get to a thousand subscribers organically.
"As more people learn what this is, that changes. People see commercials and start googling it, the same way FanDuel and DraftKings popped up through one football season in 2014, I think. What I've learned is to chill, keep making good stuff, follow your instincts, and as it gets bigger, more people will seek you out out of curiosity.
"You and I are probably in the 99th percentile of content experts for prediction markets right now. Not the audience, but the creators. Erase the self-doubt that people aren't liking it because it's not good. A video gets 300 views because people don't know to search for prediction markets yet. Give it some time. It'll be 3,000 next year."
Brian: I completely agree. That's been my biggest struggle with this show. We've had some really smart people on, but they're not making content about it, so the personality behind the camera isn't where their mind is. I'm looking for content creators with a little personality on top of the brain.
Nando: "It's our job to be the gateway. Think about SEO. If people aren't searching for the thing, it doesn't mean your SEO is bad. They're just not searching for it yet. So we keep being accessible, a gateway into the idea that you can make money off what Sarah Jessica Parker is going to say in a commencement speech. If you do just enough research, and don't just say willy-nilly, I think she's going to say Chicago, it heightens the experience of a commencement speech for you."
What Fantasy and Sports Bettors Misunderstand
Brian: What do people coming over from fantasy or sports betting tend to misunderstand about prediction markets?
Nando: "I don't think we emphasize enough that you can sell. This is a very active, organic thing. It's not set it and forget it, with maybe a cash-out offer the house determines. It's more like buying Johnson & Johnson before their sales call next week, and you can buy or sell as it goes up and down. You don't have to be dialed in, but being dialed in makes it a more fun experience. Anything that happens, you're thinking, should I sell right now? Should I buy more? It's a fun roller coaster ride.
"In fantasy, you sit there and watch the game and it's fun, because it's your team score and it all puts together. Betting, not so much. If you're choosing between betting and prediction markets, I'd go prediction markets 1,000% of the time. I don't see a reason to be betting on things anymore, because prediction markets let you actively mess with your bet as things unfold.
"Sports bettors aren't just sports bettors. They're card collectors, they love TV shows, they enjoy other stuff. Everything else you do is available to be predicted on a prediction market. It's not just I love sports and nothing else. All your other interests are available here."
Brian: If you say you can't find something on a prediction market, you don't have enough hobbies. There's way too much on there.
Knowing the Subject vs. Recognizing a Good Price
Brian: What's the difference between knowing the subject and recognizing a good price?
Nando: "Honestly, I'm Captain Long Shot. If it's too high, I'll wait. One of the other Oracles is the opposite. He doesn't mind doing something at 71 cents, because in his brain that's a lock, and there's that 29 cents he's going to get. He and I go back and forth on a lot of it. You can agree with him, but it doesn't give me that adrenaline shot.
"I need 5, 7, 12 cents, because my take is it's going to grow to 70, and then I can maybe get out, recoup what I put in, and hold the rest to see if it hits a dollar. It's going to be different for everybody. If you've got $10,000 and you're in something big enough that there's no slippage, meaning your own buying doesn't move the price, that makes a difference. Whether it's something at 71 cents or something at 17 cents, I'm 20 bucks at a time. That's a level I'm very comfortable at, spreading around a bunch of $20s, starting low, in things I'm confident are going to go up. Not 100% that it goes to a dollar, but up enough that my balance slowly rises.
"It's weird now. Buying long shots is somehow a conservative way to play these markets. If you're comfortable with something going from 3 cents to 17, that's a different way of looking at it than someone buying at 71 and hoping for a dollar, which might be the traditional conservative view. I know it's very esoteric."
Brian: I'm in a very similar boat. I may not make it all the way back up to the 71 that somebody likes buying better, but if I just go up to 41, I'm making the same money in a smaller area. I don't even have to get above 50 to make money on that movement. The sure things feel chalky and trapped to me, but I guess I haven't done enough prediction market trading for that. I love the long shots.
Nando: "There's nothing wrong with that now, because I'm always thinking of the out. When I buy something, I'm thinking of the sale. I'm not just thinking, I love this pick. If it's at 17, can I get to 33? I think so, because this, this and this will probably happen. If something weird happens along the way, oh well, on to the next. My out is always a consideration when I'm buying something."
Where to Find Nando
Brian: Where can people find more of your work with The 7 Oracles?
Nando: "It's The 7 Oracles, with the number seven, and it's our newsletter. You can also just Google one of us. We have links all over the place to our stuff, so we're fairly easy to find. And we're sticking at seven. If we have 14, we're still going to be The 7 Oracles."
You can read the newsletter at The 7 Oracles.
Nando and his teammate sit at opposite ends on price, one buying 3-cent long shots and the other comfortable at 71 cents, and Nando's own answer is that it depends on your bankroll and what kind of ride you want. Which side of that split are you on? Tell us in the PredictQ Discord. And if you're getting set up on the exchanges to try ideas like these, you can start on Kalshi and Polymarket, and check the current sign-up offers first.
This article is an adapted interview based on a real conversation about how one trader approaches prediction markets. It is not an exact transcript, a directional prediction, a trade recommendation, or investment advice. Prices, positions and odds discussed were quoted at the time of recording ([RECORDING DATE], 2026), are point-in-time, and may change. PredictQ is a marketing partner of Kalshi and Polymarket and may receive compensation for referrals.