Good afternoon traders,
Hopefully your weekend was enjoyable.
There's a lot in store this week, but the main focus is going to be on something that everyone knows about but usually only makes the headlines for two days: The Nobel Peace Prize.
We'll be diving into a bit of the history behind the prize and who traders think are most likely to win it this year.
In addition to the Peace Prize, we’ll also discuss the forecasts pertaining to the prize in Chemistry and Physics. Let’s get right into it.
The Nobel Peace Prize
The Nobel Peace Prize began with Alfred Nobel, the man who ironically invented dynamite. The wealthy Swedish chemist allocated most of his fortune to be awarded to five prizes: physiology or medicine, chemistry, literature, physics, and peace (with economics being added in 1969).
Throughout this week, the winners of the Nobel Prize in all these categories will be announced, except for economics which comes next Monday. While the prizes outside of the Peace Prize tend to generally go to academics and researchers, the Peace Prize gets the most coverage because it has a tendency to involve events and people already naturally receiving media attention.
As it stands, Sudan's Emergency Response Rooms, Doctors Without Borders, and Mykola Kuleba / Save Ukraine are traders' top 3 forecasts for being the Nobel Peace Prize Winner.
Sudan's Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs) are local volunteer groups that continue to provide lifesaving aid like food, medical care, and evacuation that would otherwise be inaccessible due to the current civil war in Sudan. Human Rights Watch classifies Sudan as the worst humanitarian crisis in the world with more than 11.8 million people having been forced from their homes. After the collapse of most formal aid systems in Sudan, many young professionals started communal kitchens and first-aid stations operating in areas controlled by both sides of the armed conflict. And despite receiving less than 1% of the international aid money for Sudan, the ERRs have helped more than 29 million people.
Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières - MSF) is another top contender. Though the cross-continental organization already won the prize in 1999 for humanitarian work, traders are giving them solid odds to win again. The organization prides itself on being independent from governmental influence and for "bearing witness" to what doctors and care providers working on the ground see. Throughout various conflicts in the Middle East and also operating in Africa and the Caribbean, MSF has long stood as a well-respected medical organization.
The last individual / group we will be highlighting is Mykola Kuleba / Save Ukraine. Kuleba ran Kyiv's children's services from 2006 to 2014 and was the president's commissioner for children's rights for 7 years from 2014-2021. His work during this time largely focused on changing Ukraine's old-school orphanage system towards foster care and family placement. Though Save Ukraine began operating during 2014 to evacuate civilians from Donbas, since 2022 the organization provides rescue services to Ukrainian children taken and held in Russia.
(Please note: Before we talk about Physics and Chemistry, we'd like to preface that the science these individuals are working on is the absolute tip of the spear, and we'd be lying if we said we understand everything they are doing. There are 10 people who really understand this stuff and coincidentally, they're all up for the Nobel Prize. We used analogies that we found fit and wanted to acknowledge that those about tying knots might not hit every base when it comes to describing quantum computing.)
Physics
If physics class bored you in high school, you'll be happy to know that traders' top picks for the Nobel Physics winner market are all working on something much cooler than calculating momentum of a car on ice: quantum computers.
A core problem of these types of computers is that they are very fragile and can completely forget what they were doing if someone in the room next door sneezes.
Alex Kitaev concocted the idea of essentially tying the computer's memory in a knot. If a long rope is tied in a knot, the rope can be wiggled and shaken but the knot would still be there. Kitaev figured out how to store information needed for quantum computing in a knot so that little bumps (like someone's AirPods falling out in the office 3 floors up) don’t cause the computer to crash.
Charles Kane laid the groundwork for topological insulators. These materials block electricity on the inside of the material but conduct electricity on the outside of the material in a way that doesn’t slow down or stop. Importantly, these materials could be used to build the “knot” computers Kitaev conceived.
The last candidate we'll be talking about for the Nobel Prize in Physics is John Preskill. A major issue in quantum computing is that mistakes are contagious. Like in the game telephone, one mistake leads to another, and with machines prone to outside interference it's easy to see the issue. Preskill figured out rules for the computations that isolate errors and check the results (and check the checkers of the results) to make sure the system doesn't implode.
Chemistry
Unlike physics, where the researchers were working on the same general system, the candidates for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry all come from very different corners of the field.
Harry Gray is a researcher and founding figure in the field of bioinorganic chemistry, the study of metals in biology. Every biological system requires energy which comes in the form of electrons moving from place to place. Electrons have to move wildly in some biological systems and how this works on the smallest level was the subject of Gray’s studies. He demonstrated quantum tunneling, essentially where electrons skip the activation energy barrier step, a wild concept both within the scientific community and externally. He figured it out though (and is currently 90 years old).
David Allara discovered that dipping gold into sulfur-containing molecules caused the molecules to line up exactly one molecule thick. While this might seem cool aesthetically, it revolutionized the way that chemists were able to design surfaces and led to tons of new technology being developed, especially in regard to electronics and human health. Though the discovery was made in 1983 at Bell Labs, traders are giving Allara solid odds.
David Liu is trading at 12% odds and his research concerns gene editing. CRISPR won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry due to its ability to edit DNA, but Liu stands a chance because of his work to make gene editing technology more precise. Base editing, which is more akin to erasing the letter of a misspelled word as opposed to replacing the whole sentence (CRISPR), and prime editing, which operates similarly but with longer strings of letters, are putting him on the list. Liu is much younger than the competitors, so it will be interesting to see how it plays out.
Whether you're interested in the technical science side of the Nobel Prize, the Peace Prize, or something completely different, there are plenty of markets to trade this week on Kalshi. We hope it's a good one.
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