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Nothing Ever Happens: Polymarket bot that always buys No on non-sports markets

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Re: Nothing Ever Happens: Polymarket bot that always buys No on non-sports markets

#42
Disclaimer: I contribute work as a political advisor and don't participate in betting markets as a market participant.

Nevertheless, Polymarket is a very interesting marketplace of sentiments and information, and it can be a very strong leading indicator of huge price movements in "real" markets like the NYSE, in part because it directly measures one factor of sentiment, i.e. whatever the prediction is about. Market sentiment determines market prices on very large and deep markets, too.

In the run-up to the election, when Trump was running against Biden, a betting market was a leading predictor of NASDAQ (a very deep, very liquid index of stocks). I wrote up the findings here: https://medium.com/@rviragh/does-the-stock-market-react-posi...

This indicator was the best one anyone has ever shown for NASDAQ for any signal, period. The signal was so strong it trumped all other signals and variances of any kind. Traders trading with just this signal and no other signal of any kind could have made practically an unlimited amount of money as long as the signal was intact. (Basically, until Biden dropped out.)

I myself didn't place any bet due to my role as a political advisor at the time, but the size of the correlation is still the biggest and most surprising one I've ever seen.

Re: Nothing Ever Happens: Polymarket bot that always buys No on non-sports markets

#43

Basically arbitraging human imagination. People love coming up with fantastical concepts because they get attention, but the more exciting a market is, the less likely it is to actually happen. Reality is usually boring.

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…

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...

Re: Nothing Ever Happens: Polymarket bot that always buys No on non-sports markets

#44
post #18

https://x.com/sterlingcrispin/status/2043723823678382254 They admit no returns. But it does seem like a fun project and nowhere does it say anything about returns or profits so not scammy imo just funny meme backed code

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

Re: Nothing Ever Happens: Polymarket bot that always buys No on non-sports markets

#45
Honest question: Why in all hell would you open source this?

I have been making money with a bot off a statistical anomaly in prediction markets lately. There is no way in hell I will open source it or tell you what that anomaly is because I have capacity back-tested it and there are so many players in the market; if all of HN and Github start downloading and use my code it WILL cease to work.

Put another way, your orders are helping move the market and price the market more efficiently; that's the market compensating you for pricing things better. If a thousand people run your strategy, prices will get moved to exactly the point where your strategy stops working. You effectively split that pie with a thousand people.

Re: Nothing Ever Happens: Polymarket bot that always buys No on non-sports markets

#48

What's the data situation like if you wanted to backtest a model like this? Is it easily accessible?

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."

Re: Nothing Ever Happens: Polymarket bot that always buys No on non-sports markets

#49
post #45

Honest question: Why in all hell would you open source this? I have been making money with a bot off a statistical anomaly in prediction markets lately. There is no way in hell I will open source it or tell you what that anomaly is because I have capacity back-tested it and there are so many players in the market; if all of HN and Github start downloading and use my code it WILL cease to work. Put another way, your o…

Because they are doing it for fun?
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