Aloha

What is Aloha?

In January, Polymarket and Dow Jones announced an agreement that paved the way for event contract data to appear on various Dow Jones sites, including The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones also owns Barron’s, Investor’s Business Daily and MarketWatch, among other media properties.

Polymarket also has marketing deals with Major League Baseball (MLB), Major League Soccer (MLS), the NHL and UFC.

While the Polymarket/Yahoo Finance situation is one of the earliest examples of a severed relationship between a prediction market operator and a media entity, that doesn’t mean those “divorces” will permeate the two industries.

About Aloha

One day before a primetime showdown between the University of Mississippi and Louisiana State University, the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana announced the launch of a tribal prediction market app. The new app, powered by Kalshi, will be launched through SaltTrade Derivatives, a newly established subdivision of a tribal-owned enterprise.

Through the collaboration, the tribe will draw upon Kalshi’s established infrastructure and market expertise to develop a distinct tribal-owned trading application, said Tunica-Biloxi Chairman Marshall Pierite in a statement.

“This partnership represents exactly the type of opportunity Indian Country should be pursuing, where Tribes are owners, innovators and leaders, not just participants,” he said. “For generations, the Tunica-Biloxi people have adapted, traded and built relationships that allowed our Nation to prosper. This initiative carries that tradition into the modern economy.”

How to play Aloha

For the gaming industry, the marked economic shift over the course of 2026 and a return to an elevated interest-rate environment after years of post-Covid easing could dissipate some of the optimism that prevailed at the onset of this year.

Many top gaming stocks have underperformed relative to the broader market in recent years, and most of the M&A activity has been facilitated by private equity and other institutions that can more readily capitalise on depressed valuations. There had been hope that rates would start to fall and help alleviate those pressures.

“Publicly traded valuations are a reflection of the current interest rate environment,” Chad Beynon, lead gaming analyst for Macquarie, told iGB. “Whether it’s a long-term financial model on a growth company, you’re going to discount that back at a higher rate, or if it’s just a standard four-wall business, the cash flows in a higher interest rate environment are worth less.”