Yes exactly.

The bot has zero risk management and I have a strong disclaimer on the github it is essentially a meme.

73% of all polymarkets do resolve to No though.

There's a good dataset on huggingface if you wanted to do some data science

https://huggingface.co/datasets/SII-WANGZJ/Polymarket_data

"just funny meme backed code"

I laughed. That's inspired. Quite the nerd-snipe as well, based on the rapidly accumulating threads on effectiveness, probabilities and markets.

When people do find an edge they tend not to share it ;)

> They admit no returns.

So it's not a useful trading strategy. Good to know.

It might have worked out that the human tendency towards optimism biased the Yes side, but Polymarket is watched closely enough by traders that the pricing is apparently realistic.

Now if you could bet against minor crypto coins, which almost always go down... But if you could, there would be traders pricing them realistically. Everybody has analytics now, and mispriced markets are detected and exploited quickly.

It must be true that more markets resolve to no than yes because many markets are linked and only have one winner. (ie. if there are 10 people in the race for who will be the next president, 9 will resolve to no)

Back up

If you bet it all on one event yes, otherwise long tail just loses your bet. Downside risk is limited to your bet.

I don't think the author is trying to pretend this is some sophisticated strategy you should actually use (note the chudjak in the image on github)

It doesn't matter if 99% resolve no, if they're priced appropriately betting no on every single one won't make you money.

> 73% of all polymarkets do resolve to No though.

I bet the average price for a no bet across these markets is 73 cents.

Does the existence of that knowledge make a slight bias lowering the odd on no? I could fork this and with a 1 line change earn dozens of dollars as long as I don't tell anyone what that secret change is.

> 73% of all polymarkets do resolve to No though.

I wonder what it means exactly. Typical Polymarket looks like this:

X happens before May. [Yes][No]

X happens before June. [Yes][No]

X happens before July. [Yes][No]

...

So even if X ended up happens in December, it's still 12.5% Yes and 87.5% No?

its funny, tells you it barely works, and its a good meme.

Successful project imo.

GitHub is down yet again. Guess they forgot to tell their AI “make no mistakes” while vibecoding.

The author also noted:

> yes this has to buy below 0.73 long term, the bot has a configurable ceiling set at 0.65 and checks for new markets buying closer to .5

https://x.com/sterlingcrispin/status/2043685362812461436

That's a massive "if".

Except that the mere existence of the market with the question posed for people to consider, probably activates the availability heuristic[1], causing people to overestimate the likelihood.

[1] https://philopedia.org/topics/availability-heuristic/

Benjamin, huh?

"Nothing ever happens"

also people overpay for skew protection and you can make consistent money selling skews (until that one time it blows up on you)

Not my project, but author said on X:

> Why predict the future when 73.4% of all Polymarkets resolve as No?

https://x.com/sterlingcrispin/status/2043398710013595857

Turkey reported high winrate until Thanksgiving

No, I think the bias is really just a reflection of how propositions are phrased. We could imagine a mirror-world prediction market that offers all the same propositions, but phrased oppositely: e.g. a market in "person X will die by Y date" becomes a market in "person X will survive until Y date". And in that market, we would see a bias towards propositions resolving as Yes.

And how do you report it in May?

I was about to say “first Microsoft service to reach zero 9s of uptime”, but then I realized, it’s Microsoft… GitHub is definitely not the first

In addition, it serves as a good template for writing your own polymarket bot with whatever logic you want.

Of course, once you add a condition like that, the probabilities change....

That presumes that there are people selling into new markets at 0.5 without thinking about the actual odds.

No, data situation is bad, at least for market making - you need to scrape the orderbook yourself to be able to do any realistic backtesting. And even then, it's hard to know whether other bids at the same price are ahead of you or behind you in the queue.

this is a good dataset

https://huggingface.co/datasets/SII-WANGZJ/Polymarket_data

"A comprehensive dataset of 1.9 billion trading records from Polymarket, processed into multiple analysis-ready formats. Features cleaned data, unified token perspectives, and user-level transformations — ready for market research, behavioral studies, and quantitative analysis."

In your scenario you're assuming the dice rolls are all independent. If polymarket bets were all pure dice rolls the 60% odds you quoted would be true.

But they aren't independent there are a lot of correlations. Global geopolitics for example.

The way the math works out, 73% of markets resolve to No, If you buy No at 0.73 each time you would break even.

Not financial advice of course

Cryptocurrency. Even if it is a traceable crypto like usdt, it doesn't seem to be enforced.

> Polymarket doesn't allow US use/users. How are folks in the US participating on Polymarket?

Same way Binance did [1]. Assuming they wouldn’t get charged.

[1] https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/362592428897

Idk if there is new KYC I dont know about, but you just needed a VPN.

Well, that's why things aren't priced uniformly, isn't it?

The problem with that thesis is that this doesn't seem to actually work as a strategy

Well, it's not making money, for one.

Because they are doing it for fun?

for the lulz obviously

you wouldn't get it

All strategies get priced in eventually. This is basically the thesis of index funds. It's fine to make money in the interim, but that isn't everyone's goal.

71 cents*, the bookie gets a cut either way it goes.

> I bet the average price for a no bet across these markets is 73 cents.

Behavioral economics has already answered the question of whether humans are, on average, perfectly rational economic actors. They are not.

To the contrary, there is substantial evidence indicating a meaningful number of humans will mis-estimate the likelihood of uncommon future events.

Why would outcomes match perceptions?

The whole premise of gambling is that they don't

It's not. But also a lot of those stats thrown around are misleading.

That's one event containing three markets, each yes/no. And in a way each market is two separate markets, buy/sell yes and buy/sell no, but they mirror each other.

For this question I'm working on https://polygains.com

What other question would you like to be backtested? This one is fairly easy

What happens if you flood the market with a bunch of implausible bets like "sun won't rise tomorrow"? Sure, you might try to filter that out with some sort of "seasoning" period (ie. don't buy new markets), but then that means more time for arbitrageurs to correctly price the market, depriving you of any price advantage you might have had.

I've backtested this kind of strategy, and it had a good return (like 100% APR), but then I realized it was cheating by knowing when things are going to resolve. Often times it's not clear. Your return depends a lot on how quickly you can get your money out. I never got around to trying a strat that doesn't know the resolution time, which actually has to be manual cause it takes some judgement to pick things that you expect to resolve soon.

Also requires a lot of volume to be "predictable" obviously, since 1 loss sets you back 10-20 wins. It's surprisingly hard to find reasonable-liquidity markets after all your filtering. Many have huge spreads or thin books. Scare quotes around "predictable" because you never know if others will use this strat or a lot of unlikely events will happen due to insiders.

Another thing, just like the author, I was excluding sports in all the above. Yes Polymarket is famous for letting people bet on world events etc, but turns out it's still more about sports. Betting on the overdog in sports markets seems more appealing because there are plenty of those events with large volume, they're kinda homogenous, you know exactly when they resolve, and they're harder to rig. I simply never got around to putting real time or money into the overdog strat.

I love heroku, death to vercel

Polymarket has been live in the US since the beginning of the year. There is a queue but it’s absolutely live. And before that you could still use it so long as you did not use a VPN.

My general observation is that people tend to underestimate the likelihood of black swan events (covid, financial crisis) even as it's pretty obvious they're happening. And then when they do accept it, they react too far the other way and assume it's never going to end.

I've had success playing the markets in these specific cases. I did fritter away a lot of my gains from the financial crisis thinking I was a genius market timer. But I learned my lesson and didn't waver once I jumped back in after covid.

In both cases I got out before a bulk of the crash and timed the bottom almost to the day. Lucky I know, but I had reasons for both. For the financial crisis it was when Bill Fleckenstein closed his bear fund and put it all in MSFT. For covid it was when it looked like the lockdown was working and NYC hospitals weren't going to completely fall over like Northern Italy or Wuhan.

For any non black-swan scenarios, I assume I'll never get one up on the masters of the universe and just leave everything in blended age-appropriate funds.

I'm very concerned about an AI crash and the future of white collar work in general. But it feels more like a slow death to me than a black swan. So I'm just hedging with bonds and cash and stocks that hopefully don't crash as hard in a recession.

This makes sense to me, but isn't there a risk of increasing the potential payoff high enough that someone is motivated to go out and make the yes side happen?

Consider this bot running on us military outcomes or something.

it avoids sports bets because "Who will win game 6 of XYZ" is formatted on the polymarket backend as a Yes/No bet. There's a lot of markets with Yes/No plumbing even though you wouldn't interpret them as such

Strategies like this can easily be positive EV until enough people discover it and that actually is the driving force behind efficient pricing.

Here's how the mechanism works: I find that something is statistically worth $0.70 but I am able to buy it for $0.60 and statistically sell it for $0.70 (in the average). I make $0.10 each trade on average. Until you come along, copy my strategy and change $0.60 to $0.61 to frontrun my trades. Then someone else does it for $0.62. Until the market finally reprices to $0.70 where it should be. The guy who tries $0.71 loses money and stops, and then it goes back to $0.70. It's a stable feedback loop.

There are lots of positive EV strategies lying around in these inefficient markets that Citadel hasn't (yet) descended upon. The best advice I can give is if you find one, trade the hell out of it and don't open source it or tell anyone about it, because as soon as more people run it, it will cease to be positive EV and then after that it becomes an infrastructure game.

If it's popular on Github it probably doesn't work.

If you found something that works and is paying your rent, don't put it on Github. My 2 cents.

That logic doesn't work because not every bet have even payouts. If there's a market for whether a dice rolls 1 or not, the odds might resolve to "no" 83% of the time, but if it only pays you $1.1 per dollar wagered on "no", you're still losing money.

Falling victim to the classic fallacy. So sad

Even if a cut isn't taken and there aren't other inefficiencies, any money tied up in long-term predictions is earning 0% instead of whatever the current risk-free rate of return is.

That doesn't matter so much when it happens in a place where people can make money from other people's irrationality. Even if there are a bunch of irrational people placing bad bets on uncommon future events, rational people looking to make a buck will take the other side of that bet, until the price is sensible.

The alternative would be that there's a bunch of free money sitting there waiting for someone to decide to pick it up, and nobody is, not even you.

But in aggregate they might.

Well, if the price would be incorrectly set, then bots like this one would make money, which would in sufficient time cause the market to adapt and the average price would change so the bot doesn't work.

Are you willing to pay $.27 for that perspective? Sounds like we have a market!

I understand that. That's not my question tho. I am asking for the exact meaning of the 73% number.

For every bucket of probability, what is the chance it resolves correctly?

For example, for markets that are between 60 and 70, is it the case that around 65% of them resolve to yes?

I guess you want to take a certain time before out finishes, so focus on sports.

jane street is always hiring!

> What happens if you flood the market with a bunch of implausible bets like "sun won't rise tomorrow"?

Who does "you" refer to in this sentence? Polymarket itself?

I'm pretty sure if Polymarket itself decides it wants to screw you, you're gonna lose no natter what your strategy is.

Forgot to add, I wet-ran the non-sports strat once with $100 and lost like $5 net across the month. Not enough diversification like I said, so yeah maybe I'd make $6 the next month. I could only find like 10 things that met all the criteria: ≥90c price, low spread, thick enough ask ($5?), not sports, not related to certain topics that I thought were rigged (eg Mr Beast, Trump saying keywords in speech), likely resolving within a week. Some of them also weirdly took longer to resolve than the title suggested.

> 1 loss sets you back 10-20 wins

Good old eat like a bird, poop like an elephant.

Considering moving my team to Vercel. Why?

Strange. The current terms state:

> Restricted Jurisdictions. You acknowledge and agree that you are not permitted to access, use or trade with the Contracts on the Platform if you are residing in, a citizen of, organized in or located in the following jurisdictions (collectively, the “Restricted Jurisdictions”): Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Ontario, Poland, Quebec, Russia, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, the United Kingdom, the United States; or a jurisdiction or territory that is the subject of comprehensive country-wide, territory-wide, or regional economic sanctions by the United States, including but not limited to Iran, Syria, Cuba, North Korea, and the Crimea, Dontesk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine.

Maybe I'm supposed to ignore that?

Fall for it? I think it's pretty clear the author is not trying to convince any one of anything. It's mostly a joke.

They underestimate the likelihood of black swan because it is very hard for adults to concretely imagine things that have not happened before and then even temporarily fully believe ~"dreams will come true."

One of my go-tos on this is the Fukushima nuclear accident. IIUC there were plenty of folks in Japan who knew of the high risk. Perhaps many interested in nuclear energy outside of Japan, too.

But the average adult if asked about the prospect of a major nuclear incident occurring say, "tomorrow," would narrow their eyes in skepticism. There's almost an instinctual level seeding of doubt.

This can be a good thing. LK-99 was an excellent test of the dissonance from dramatic changes in reality and costs of inaccuracy.

The greatest VCs I have known are exceptional at suspending disbelief to test their ability to basically shape world building.

I would also not want to take even a fair bet against black swan because the day that "S&P500 falls to lowest level since 2016 as Labubus collapse" is the headline is the exact day I least want to lose a big pile of money gambling. If it's the shareholder's money though.... I'm probably getting laid off in that scenario anyways...

I make similar bets. The SAAS "apocalypse" looks like a buying opportunity to me.

Fair enough, I assumed the exclusion of sports with a deliberate decision rather than one forced on the project due to the technical details of the platform.

Untrue for polymarket. True for kalshi. No bookie fees on polymarket

The whole premise of prediction markets is that the few people whose perception do match outcomes make bets to push the money-weighted average perception toward outcomes. If perceptions still don't match outcomes at that point, average return is 0 minus transactions, with high variance.

If the average no costs less than 73 cents, but the 73% of all polymarkets resolve to No, that would imply that the nothing-ever-happens strategy here is profitable. Are you claiming that it is profitable? Or are one of those premises incorrect?

Edit: conversely, if the average no costs _more_ than 73 cents, but the 73% of all polymarkets resolve to No, that would imply that an everything-always-happens strategy is profitable (neglecting slippage)

There are quite a few of those, my favourite: https://polymarket.com/event/will-jesus-christ-return-before...

If you put all your money on no, you get 4% if you win, and if Jesus comes back and you lose, money won't matter.

> One loss sets you back 10-20 wins.

didn't look at the numbers, but this one sentence reminds me of selling options for 'passive income' (don't do that)

Whether it's pennies in front of a steamroller will depend on the entry price, EV, time left to resolution and many other variables.

Though I agree it's bad math, even if 70% resolve to no, there's a high variance among all of them, and to know whether it's a good bet or not... you have to do your DD on that particular market. Even if you follow the Kelly criterion, randomly choosing bets will probably tank your bankroll sooner or later.

"Nothing ever happens" ETF

By design it's a game where people with inside knowledge or enough power to bend reality can steal money from people with gambling addiction. Automating your addiction might not be the best move.

You're thinking like an engineer and making the laughable assumption that "prediction markets" are markets. It's totally unregulated with all sorts of grifts and cheats. One of the platforms was promoting a high-return bet against Rory at the Masters yesterday.

You can make money off of all sorts of stuff. You can "sell" the bets, so there's lots of live pump and dump.

We've gone full circle. The bookie with no neck that smelled like onions was more honest than these platforms.

This all really depends on the efficiency of the market. I think these prediction markets would claim that is their goal, but even Wall Street isn't perfectly efficient. I would also guess that sports betting sites like DraftKings or FanDuel would be even less efficient and less likely to be swayed by a popular GitHub repo. Once again, it goes back to the share of the market that is participating for entertainment purposes. That's a lot more common for sports betting than it is for will the US bomb a certain country.

We call it a "black turkey event", nobody saw it coming.

From what I've seen and tested, it's been profitable, for the reason you said. Variance and other caveats caused me to not pursue it further. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47754918

>you get 4% if you win,

This locks up your money in the meantime, right? If so, considering the fed funds rate is 3.64% (and you can probably get higher rates on stablecoins), a huge chunk of those "winnings" is going to be eaten up by the opportunity cost of the money.

huh? that sounds like ideology and not empirical observation.

I drew the same analogy. You put up $0.95, a YES gambler only puts $0.05 (ignoring spread); you're providing "insurance" in case of a YES. In theory, even if the market prices reflected the true probability of the event happening, the more expensive side should be netting some "insurance premium" on average, right? Not sure, and idk how to observe if that's happening.

Polymarket is also holding onto the money in the meantime. Idk what they do with it, but it's not like some other platforms where they at least work with a bank to earn you some tiny interest on it.

Wow that's news to me. How does polymarket make money if not from fees?

> Whether it's pennies in front of a steamroller will depend on […] many other variables.

No, all these variables cancel out.

If you were picking and choosing, yes. But this approach is basically betting no on all the markets.

The textbook explanation of this is the central limit theorem, proving this mathematically is a bit more involved for power-law systems like this but it’s empirically valid.

I think these would qualify https://etfdb.com/etfdb-category/inverse-volatility/

> but even Wall Street isn't perfectly efficient.

Yes, you can find positive EV trades on Wall Street as well. I've been diving into this a lot lately, all I can say is it's 10X harder to find strategies that work on Wall Street than prediction markets.

With one exception.

The one easy long-lasting anomaly to exploit on Wall Street which actually does NOT exist on prediction markets: "American stocks go up most of the time". This is actually a massively exploitable structural anomaly (you just buy and hold forever and effectively reap the rewards of a biased coin) and the source of the anomaly is mostly US monetary policy, US foreign policy, and US tech expertise put together. However, it still is an anomaly. The thesis that SPY will continue going up forever is also predicated on these things continuing to work the way they have in the past.

Quintessential hustler logic: inability to compare the gains from wins to inevitable losses.

This is what markets like Polymarket boil down to. Normies can't win. Some will, of course, but that's just chance and there's no way if ensuring it's you.

It's really no different than a casino: if you ever find yourself with more money than you walked in with, cash out and leave.

Best strategy for most people though is to simply not participate and you'll break even.

Wouldn't a high-return bet against Rory make sense? He was very likely to win.

That's just how limit order books work with mark-to-market pricing

They probably make interest off it themselves, so to give you any interest would cut into their margins.

It doesn't seem like it's strictly true that they don't charge trading fees.

From their docs, it looks like they charge fees to bet "takers" (as opposed to makers), but exclude the geopolitical and world-events markets where they don't charge fees.

I have to imagine that may be related to some of the blow-back towards prediction markets about profiting on topics like war & their potential for manipulation.

Given it sounds like the bot bets everywhere other than sports, many of those categories would likely have fees in this case.

Polymarket charges “taker” fees (people removing liquidity by matching listed orders) on most markets. Geopolitics markets are exempt. A portion of the collected fees then get redistributed to “makers” (people who provide liquidity by listing orders for others to match). Presumably the rest of these fees make up polymarket’s revenue.

Sure.

But isn’t weird the betting platform is sending an app notification saying “hey bet on this dude to win $X”?

Except, the thing is, a decent portion of the population enjoys throwing money away in casinos. If they feel a similar level of enjoyment/entertainment from this type of market, then it's no different and they're playing for a non-financial purpose that your calculus isn't pricing in. Maybe a stretch but theoretically, if they enjoy it enough, it can serve as a much cheaper alternative to a casino and thus could actually have a positive net return to one's personal finances even while losing.

And, I'm not even contemplating gambling addiction. There's a huge market of people that just go to Vegas once or twice a year and come home thousands of dollars poorer. But they don't need it, they may not gamble outside of Vegas, or nothing that would signal an addiction.

You say that like it's bad thing, but really it's great!

It gives us normies a way to see what the powerful are thinking.

> If they feel a similar level of enjoyment/entertainment from this type of market, then it's no different

If Polymarket were regulated like a casino, I’d actually have no problem with it.

how can it be cheaper? people will spend the same amount or even more considering that is more easy to spend more since it's digital

normies that don't enter the game, because the ones that do just loose their money