> What are the risks
I don't have the slightest idea what point you're trying to make with this. Journalists make lots of people unhappy with their reporting, if you're referring to risks to journalists? Indeed that's part of the job of being a truth teller.
> nobody sane uses the stock market as an indicator for the future
I don't think you understand. If you think you can do a better job of predicting the future than the stock market, you will become extremely wealthy. So how exactly do you think it isn't basically the best publicly available indicator of the future, specifically the net present value of future expected profits?
Sophisticated analysts absolutely use current stock prices/market value for modeling the future.
Making people unhappy doesn't cause them to declare bankruptcy and become homeless. People may lose their reputation by reporting falsehoods in the paper (though probably not). People might read incorrect information in the newspaper. People may directly lose access to food and shelter due to gambling. The risks are no where close to equivalent.
> I don't think you understand. [...]
I don't think you understand. Let's imagine a scenario: the market valuation of NVIDIA is high and has been trending up YTD, with some sizeable dips every couple of weeks. What does that tell you about the future?
Let's imagine another scenario. The odds on Polymarket of GPT-5.5 releasing in April just jumped from 40% to 95%. What does that tell you about the future?
You can try to derive information out of a stock market price, but it is not a prediction tool. The newspaper and Polymarket are more directly comparable in the context of prediction tools, because they both tell you exactly what they predict.
The risks of the stock market are closer to the risks of Polymarket (and the former has tons of regulations for obvious reasons, as demonstrated in the article), but the function is completely different.