About this app
What is Vacation Station?
The operational infrastructure available to these new firms, however, remains underdeveloped. Gonzalez contrasts prediction markets with equities, where trading businesses can use prime brokers, clearinghouses and standardised systems such as FIX.
“When it comes to prediction markets, none of that exists,” he said. “Everyone that’s building in the prediction market space mostly starts from ground zero.”
Platforms were generally constructed for one person operating one account, rather than trading organisations requiring separate permissions and controls. According to Gonzalez, some teams still share a single login.
About Vacation Station
Carrot Top is nothing like Gallagher. His props aren’t watermelons meant to be smashed with a sledgehammer. They’re topical jokes complete with setups, tags, reversals, and callbacks. They are gadgets engineered with the punk-rock aesthetic of early Saturday Night Live.
And many are filthy—much too explicit to detail here. Children are barred from the showroom for good reason.
The first audience eruption during our visit came from a pair of Paris Hilton night-vision goggles. When he looked through them, everything turned grainy green as he struck the stiff, awkward posture recognizable from her leaked sex tape. No explanation. No setup. Just the goggles and the pose. The joke was perfectly timed to the cultural moment—the exact kind of gag Letterman would have killed for.
About Vacation Station
“They challenge us both from an academic side and a more practical side. We try to develop our rules as we go along but you have to prove every single day that you’re doing all that you need to do on responsible gaming,” Petra notes.
The Netherlands online gambling market has been the subject of many column inches and much speculation thanks to regulation that has been largely described as heavy-handed and perhaps a little short-sighted – even by the country’s own regulator.
The triumvirate of Netherlands, Germany and Sweden is often held up as an example of how not to regulate, with all three countries haemorrhaging players to waiting illegal operators. So what is public sentiment like towards operators? “My feeling is that if you look at public sentiment, they don’t see really the difference between online and land-based,” says Petra. “If you look into what they’re saying, they’re primarily talking online. But for the general public, there is no difference [between the channels] in that respect.”
