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Trump's Chances Of Winning A Nobel Prize Just Got Better, According To Betting Companies

by Seth Millstein
Handout/Getty Images News/Getty Images

The next time he's updating his résumé, Donald Trump may get to add "Nobel Laureate" to his list of awards and accomplishments. After the historic meeting between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore on Monday, bettors put the odds of Trump winning the Nobel Peace Prize — either alone or with Kim — at 6:4, or 40 percent, according to the betting site Ladbrokes.

In the eyes of bettors, Trump's chances of taking home the peace prize have oscillated over the last several months. Back in March, bettors at Ladbrokes only gave the president 2:1 odds of winning it — a 30 percent chance. But in May, after the Trump-Kim summit was announced, the duo became odds-on favorites to jointly win the Nobel Peace prize, with bettors at Ladbrokes giving them 4:6 odds, or a 60 percent, of being awarded the prize together.

The odds at Ladbrokes are not the result of a subjective analysis from experts; rather, they're simply a reflection of where and how bettors are putting their money.

Though Trump enjoys relatively good odds of winning a joint peace prize with Kim, bettors think it's much more unlikely that he'll win it by himself: The odds of Trump being the sole recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, as Barack Obama was in 2009, are just 10:1, or just 9 percent at Ladbrokes.

Moreover, Trump is no longer the favorite to win the peace prize, despite his good odds. That would be Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who bettors give a 50 percent chance of being jointly awarded the honor in 2018.

Kim, Moon and Trump aren't the only ones who've been given non-trivial odds of winning the Nobel Peace Prize by the bettors at Ladbrokes. Other contenders include the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees at 10:1; Catalan separatist leader Carlos Puigdemont at 12:1; German Chancellor Angela Merkel at 16:1; and the ACLU at 20:1. Further on down the list are Edward Snowden at 25:1 and U.K. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn at 100:1.

Odds that are derived from real-life bets, such as those on Ladbrokes, are helpful in that they reflect which outcomes people are actually putting their money on. However, that doesn't necessarily mean they're more accurate. In March, for instance, Ladbrokes bettors gambled on where the Trump-Kim summit would be held. The odds-on favorite at that point was China at 4:5 odds, followed by South Korea at 3:1, the United States at 5:1 and Japan at 10:1. Ultimately, however, the summit was held in Singapore, which wasn't even one of the options. The Ladbrokes bettors weren't even close.

Ladbrokes is also much more bullish on Trump's chances of winning a Nobel Prize than other betting sites. Over at PredictIt, bettors only give Trump a 14 percent chance of being a 2018 Peace Prize winner as of this writing.

At their summit in Singapore, Trump and Kim signed an agreement pledging to "join their efforts to build a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula," repatriate the remains of soldiers who were killed in the Korean War, and "work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula." The agreement was short on details as to how any of this will be accomplished, and was more of a mutual expression of good will and intentions than a plan of action for going forward.

However, Trump did agree to suspend the United States' annual military exercises with South Korea, which the North has long opposed. Whether that will pave the way to lasting peace on the peninsula remains to be seen, but it's a start.