31–40 of 107 posts
This whole prediction market space seems like a 2026 version of ball and cup game betting. Most of the people participating fail to understand that they (and their pointless bets up for harvesting) are the product here.
The winners, as you point out, are the house and those with insider knowledge.
Text-only, no Javascript, no CAPTCHA, no DDoS on blog, no geo-blocking, HTTPS optional:
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA22jnEi...
> On Kalshi, too, losers vastly outnumber winners. Spokeswoman Elisabeth Diana said there are 2.9 unprofitable users for each profitable one based on data from the past month So 25% of users are profitable? That's vastly more than on financial sites - stocks/futures/forex/options trading where only 5% of bettors are profitable.
Uhm, I'd like to introduce you to our Lord and Savior index funds. Simply buy vtsax and forget for 30 years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to play penny stocks for fun and it was a blast to be doing $3000 trades and be responsible for 30% of the volume for the day. You can learn a lot about how markets work if you adopt a penny stock, particularly the kind that trades in a wide range where you can buy in at 0.03 and figure "I'll sell when it hits 0.12" and sooner or later it does... then falls back down to 0.02.
You can "trade the news" with penny stocks (this is basically just buying when people first start talking about it then selling when more people are talking about it), but like you say, the liquidity is soooooo low that you have to be really careful if you plan to sell more than a few hundred dollars. Generally, you're going to lose money - so don't do it.
Myself I was working on finance-adjacent stuff at the time and thought it had educational value. I did OK trading my favorite penny stock but I've had my share of financial misadventures, like I just had to buy $XIV because I wanted to see what happened and... I did.
If by "sharks" you mean "inside traders" then yes.
I had a thesis two months ago that you could detect predictors with insider knowledge and ride their coat tails and spent some amount of time staring at the data and running some ML algos to detect them. I learned some things about the market during this time, but did not succeed in my detection algorithm. * Polymarket is a bit more transparent with who placed what bet, so it's a good place to go to study winners. *…
This whole prediction market space seems like a 2026 version of ball and cup game betting. Most of the people participating fail to understand that they (and their pointless bets up for harvesting) are the product here.
My intuition is that it is a lot like sports betting: many laypeople bet for what they hope will happen, rather than trying to beat the market earnestly. The winners, as you point out, are the house and those with insider knowledge.
People keep saying they provide the market with information, and that's the benefit of allowing the insider trading, but no one has pointed out how in any way society has benefitted from the insider trading instances so far...