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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

#51

Post by doctorpangloss »

baq wrote: post #38
traderj0e wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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)

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

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

#52

Post by fooker »

Don’t be gullible enough to fall for this bad math.

Say 70% of the time it resolves to ‘no’, you still don’t make money by blindly choosing ‘no’.

Guess why?

Hint: This strategy is also described with the macabre analogy: picking up pennies in front of a steamroller.

Do you want to pick up pennies in front of a steamroller?

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

#53

Post by Bratmon »

nkrisc wrote: post #33
cryptonym wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

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

#54

Post by slg »

It's interesting that this is explicitly for non-sports markets because I see no reason why this would be less applicable there. Sports betters have long talked about that the winning strategy is usually to bet the under (i.e. the no) on most bets. The over (i.e. the yes) is generally a more exciting and fun outcome which causes it to attract more betters which in turns makes that side overpriced.

Like with this bot, I have no idea if that will still lead to actual positive returns. This might just be a remnant from a time when these betting lines were set less intelligently. But all things being equal, it seems logical that "boring" bets would have a better return in the long run than "exciting" bets as long as some betters are at least partially motivated by entertainment.

There's probably a lot of knowledge like this that sports betters have built up over decades that could apply to these new forms of non-sports gambling.

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

#55

Post by Bratmon »

gruez wrote: post #21
m-hodges wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

> 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.

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

#56

Post by raincole »

sterlingcrispin wrote: post #44
tekno45 wrote: 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

> 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?

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

#57

Post by sterlingcrispin »

nzach wrote: post #22

If this seems interesting for you remember that if you are putting $100 in a 99 to 1 bet you need to win 100 times to get $100 but only need to loose 1 time to loose $100. And the chance of losing at least once in a 99% sure bet after 100 rounds is around 60%. Even if you reduce to 30 rounds it still is around 30%. This may seem smart at first glance, but the math doesn't really checks out.

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

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

#58

Post by conductr »

nkrisc wrote: post #33
cryptonym wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

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

#59

Post by sterlingcrispin »

dheera wrote: 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…

for the lulz obviously

you wouldn't get it

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

#60

Post by sterlingcrispin »

slg wrote: post #54

It's interesting that this is explicitly for non-sports markets because I see no reason why this would be less applicable there. Sports betters have long talked about that the winning strategy is usually to bet the under (i.e. the no) on most bets. The over (i.e. the yes) is generally a more exciting and fun outcome which causes it to attract more betters which in turns makes that side overpriced. Like with this bot,…

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
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