[HN Gopher] Nothing Ever Happens: Polymarket bot that always buy...
___________________________________________________________________
Nothing Ever Happens: Polymarket bot that always buys No on non-
sports markets
Author : m-hodges
Score : 329 points
Date : 2026-04-13 15:31 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| tekno45 wrote:
| any stats on your returns so far?
| pawelduda wrote:
| Turkey reported high winrate until Thanksgiving
| vessenes wrote:
| Falling victim to the classic fallacy. So sad
| syncsynchalt wrote:
| We call it a "black turkey event", nobody saw it coming.
| m-hodges wrote:
| 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
| gruez wrote:
| 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.
| wormpilled wrote:
| 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.
| nemomarx wrote:
| 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.
| cryptonym wrote:
| 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.
| nkrisc wrote:
| 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.
| Bratmon wrote:
| 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.
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| normies that don't enter the game, because the ones that
| do just loose their money
| conductr wrote:
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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.
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| 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
| Spooky23 wrote:
| 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.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Wouldn't a high-return bet against Rory make sense? He was
| very likely to win.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Sure.
|
| But isn't weird the betting platform is sending an app
| notification saying "hey bet on this dude to win $X"?
| jazzpush2 wrote:
| Well, that's why things aren't priced uniformly, isn't it?
| suzzer99 wrote:
| 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.
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| 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...
| chairmansteve wrote:
| I make similar bets. The SAAS "apocalypse" looks like a
| buying opportunity to me.
| bredren wrote:
| 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.
| some_random wrote:
| The problem with that thesis is that this doesn't seem to
| actually work as a strategy
| throwaway2027 wrote:
| Already priced in.
| jp57 wrote:
| 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/
| m-hodges wrote:
| 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
| gruez wrote:
| 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.
| baq wrote:
| jane street is always hiring!
| Bratmon wrote:
| > 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.
| fer wrote:
| 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.
| gruez wrote:
| >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.
| hoerzu wrote:
| For this question I'm working on https://polygains.com
|
| What other question would you like to be backtested? This one
| is fairly easy
| lordnacho wrote:
| 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.
| gowld wrote:
| That presumes that there are people selling into new markets
| at 0.5 without thinking about the actual odds.
| zahlman wrote:
| Of course, once you add a condition like that, the
| probabilities change....
| declan_roberts wrote:
| "Nothing ever happens"
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| Benjamin, huh?
| thatnerd wrote:
| I think we've collectively DDoSed it. I'm getting a 504 timeout.
|
| The author [page](https://github.com/sterlingcrispin) is there on
| github, but I can't even find his full list of his repos to
| confirm it's still there (I also get a 504 on that).
| nothinkjustai wrote:
| GitHub is down yet again. Guess they forgot to tell their AI
| "make no mistakes" while vibecoding.
| aprilnya wrote:
| 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
| thatnerd wrote:
| Back up
| thetailrisk wrote:
| What's the data situation like if you wanted to backtest a model
| like this? Is it easily accessible?
| croemer wrote:
| 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.
| sterlingcrispin wrote:
| 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."
| tekno45 wrote:
| 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
| sterlingcrispin wrote:
| 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
| raincole wrote:
| > 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?
| traderj0e wrote:
| 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.
| raincole wrote:
| I understand that. That's not my question tho. I am
| asking for the _exact_ meaning of the 73% number.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| And how do you report it in May?
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| > 73% of all polymarkets do resolve to No though.
|
| I bet the average price for a no bet across these markets is
| 73 cents.
| traderj0e wrote:
| It's not. But also a lot of those stats thrown around are
| misleading.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| 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)
| traderj0e wrote:
| 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
| cheschire wrote:
| Are you willing to pay $.27 for that perspective? Sounds
| like we have a market!
| kristopolous wrote:
| Why would outcomes match perceptions?
|
| The whole premise of gambling is that they don't
| gowld wrote:
| 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.
| kristopolous wrote:
| huh? that sounds like ideology and not empirical
| observation.
| bofadeez wrote:
| That's just how limit order books work with mark-to-
| market pricing
| xrisk wrote:
| Could you point me towards some resource that would help
| me understand what you wrote? Genuinely curious about how
| this stuff works
| paulddraper wrote:
| But in aggregate they might.
| bargainbin wrote:
| 71 cents*, the bookie gets a cut either way it goes.
| mr_00ff00 wrote:
| Untrue for polymarket. True for kalshi. No bookie fees on
| polymarket
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| Wow that's news to me. How does polymarket make money if
| not from fees?
| CrazyStat wrote:
| 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.
| SirSourdough wrote:
| 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.
| zahlman wrote:
| 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.
| xrisk wrote:
| Assuming that the prediction market is perfectly priced
| right? How accurate is that assumption, or are you
| counting that as an "inefficiency"?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| This is the truth of the matter, ultimately nobody wins
| except the bookie, who profits either way.
| mrandish wrote:
| > 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.
| skywalqer wrote:
| 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.
| wat10000 wrote:
| 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.
| cortesoft wrote:
| It doesn't matter if a vast majority of people are not
| rational economic actors. It only takes 1 rational actor
| with enough capital to take the other side of all the bad
| bets, and the market will be priced correctly even if the
| other 99 people are irrational.
| tekno45 wrote:
| its funny, tells you it barely works, and its a good meme.
|
| Successful project imo.
| craftkiller wrote:
| In addition, it serves as a good template for writing your
| own polymarket bot with whatever logic you want.
| theginger wrote:
| 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.
| zahlman wrote:
| 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.
| some_random wrote:
| It doesn't matter if 99% resolve no, if they're priced
| appropriately betting no on every single one won't make you
| money.
| treyd wrote:
| That's a _massive_ "if".
| some_random wrote:
| Totally, that's the entire conjecture of this bot. My
| point is just that the odds of the underlying events are
| irrelevant, what matters is if they're matched with the
| betting price
| irishcoffee wrote:
| It is not the entire conjecture of this bot. The dev
| claimed a percentage of bets that win with "no" and wrote
| some code to fuck around.
|
| You though, are claiming that the market is perfectly
| priced, or should be, such that this strategy won't work.
| It's pretty hard to balance the odds of an animal seeing
| their shadow vs the expected strike price of the nasdaq.
| It's clear you're not familiar with betting markets,
| which is in your best interest most likely, but that's
| not how this works.
|
| You're arguing against yourself... against a point nobody
| made but you.
| ryandrake wrote:
| For the uninitiated, I believe the meme comes from Reddit,
| where there is one criticism subreddit, r/ThatHappened where
| people accuse other Redditors of making up stories of events
| that never actually happened, and then a meta-criticism
| subreddit, r/Nothingeverhapens, where people make fun of
| r/ThatHappened as conspiracy theorists who think everything
| posted online is fake. Hard to tell how much of each
| subreddit is trolling and how much are people earnestly
| criticizing each other.
| eudamoniac wrote:
| It comes from 4chan, like all decent memes
|
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/nothing-ever-happens
| topspin wrote:
| "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.
| yyurgenson wrote:
| 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)
| jmcgough wrote:
| When people do find an edge they tend not to share it ;)
| Animats wrote:
| > 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.
| hodder wrote:
| Basically, realized vol is lower than implied vol over time. Yes.
| swyx wrote:
| also people overpay for skew protection and you can make
| consistent money selling skews (until that one time it blows up
| on you)
| nzach wrote:
| 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.
| sterlingcrispin wrote:
| 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
| sambaumann wrote:
| Related: https://www.jbecker.dev/research/prediction-market-
| microstru... (previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46680515)
| cordwainersmith wrote:
| The contrarian bet is fun but I wonder how it actually holds up.
| Prediction markets do tend to overprice dramatic outcomes, so
| "always bet no" isn't as dumb as it sounds. Would love to see
| real P&L over a few months, not just the thesis.
| traderj0e wrote:
| 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.
| baq wrote:
| > 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)
| traderj0e wrote:
| 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.
| nsvd2 wrote:
| They probably make interest off it themselves, so to give
| you any interest would cut into their margins.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Quintessential hustler logic: inability to compare the
| gains from wins to inevitable losses.
| pjc50 wrote:
| LTCM doing that was an early example of "too big to fail".
| In the late 90s.
| traderj0e wrote:
| 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.
| pi-rat wrote:
| > 1 loss sets you back 10-20 wins
|
| Good old eat like a bird, poop like an elephant.
| cortesoft wrote:
| I assume all the 'no' bets have to have an explicit end date,
| otherwise the 'no' bet could never win? The time horizon is
| never unknown on these bets.
| superfrank wrote:
| I'm pretty into prediction markets and have some strategies
| that make me small, but consistent returns.
|
| I think timing is the missing piece of this. Just randomly
| betting no on everything likely isn't going to give good
| results, but if you tied in a news API and just bet no on
| anything related to a major story right after the news starts
| picking it up, I would expect you could make a solid return.
| swyx wrote:
| > Heroku Workflow The shell helpers use either an explicit app
| name argument or HEROKU_APP_NAME.
|
| nice to see heroku still alive...
| sterlingcrispin wrote:
| I love heroku, death to vercel
| seizethecheese wrote:
| Considering moving my team to Vercel. Why?
| logicallee wrote:
| 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.
| Majromax wrote:
| Wet streets cause rain? You don't show that the Polymarket
| signal lead Nasdaq.
| dheera wrote:
| 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.
| debo_ wrote:
| Because they are doing it for fun?
| sterlingcrispin wrote:
| for the lulz obviously
|
| you wouldn't get it
| unclad5968 wrote:
| 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.
| boothby wrote:
| Well, it's not making money, for one.
| qbane wrote:
| null hypothesis bot
| fooker wrote:
| 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?
| lokar wrote:
| 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.
| fer wrote:
| 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.
| fooker wrote:
| > 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.
| slg wrote:
| 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.
| sterlingcrispin wrote:
| 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
| slg wrote:
| 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.
| dheera wrote:
| 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.
| slg wrote:
| 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.
| dheera wrote:
| > 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.
| wavemode wrote:
| > I would also guess that sports betting sites like
| DraftKings or FanDuel would be even less efficient
|
| Your strategy doesn't work on sportbooks to begin with,
| because bookmakers don't move the odds with the action.
|
| That is, there is no such phenomenon as "the over is
| exciting therefore overpriced". Bookmakers price purely
| based on facts and statistics. Their pricing isn't affected
| by excitement nor by how many people are betting a certain
| way.
| slg wrote:
| >Bookmakers price purely based on facts and statistics.
| Their pricing isn't affected by excitement nor by how
| many people are betting a certain way.
|
| If this were true, lines would never move unless there
| was breaking news, but we see lines move all the time
| without there being any material change to those "facts
| and statistics".
| dheera wrote:
| I think the distinction is that sports betting companies
| are basically casinos, need to guard their edge, and
| although they will tolerate some moving of lines, they
| will kick out players who consistently eat their edge,
| and will rig the lines at a place where they can still
| profit.
|
| Different from a prediction market like Polymarket or
| Kalshi whose income probably comes mostly from
| transaction fees rather than house edge. Otherwise these
| platforms wouldn't welcome bots so much. Bots =>
| efficient pricing + transaction volume => profit for them
| wavemode wrote:
| > without there being any material change
|
| Without there being any material change _you can see_. If
| you had access to all the tips and data and insider
| information that sportbooks operate with, you could be a
| bookmaker too.
| chrisgd wrote:
| Very cool. The opposite of the black swan or turkey corollary.
| Every day the turkey gets fed and is happy until Thanksgiving
| rolls around.
| modeless wrote:
| Polymarket already has "Nothing Ever Happens" markets where you
| can bet on a set of events all not happening together. Because
| why not.
| neko_ranger wrote:
| "Nothing ever happens" ETF
| modeless wrote:
| I think these would qualify https://etfdb.com/etfdb-
| category/inverse-volatility/
| 1attice wrote:
| Too bad we can't run this bot in the nineties. There seems to be
| quite a bit happening these days.
|
| The stopped clock is right twice a day, but it reads noon and
| we're at half past three
| Retr0id wrote:
| Someone has (had?) a bot on Manifold that does the same thing,
| and it is profitable: https://manifold.markets/dcxStep
|
| (Manifold doesn't use real money, so there's more "free money"
| lying around waiting to be picked up than on most real-money
| markets)
| declan_roberts wrote:
| I saw the Twitter meme and knew instantly he was going to be a
| good follow. Was not disappointed!
| withinrafael wrote:
| Very confusing. Polymarket doesn't allow US use/users. How are
| folks in the US participating on Polymarket? (VPNs and the like
| reportedly don't help either due to KYC policies.)
| Cider9986 wrote:
| Cryptocurrency. Even if it is a traceable crypto like usdt, it
| doesn't seem to be enforced.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Idk if there is new KYC I dont know about, but you just needed
| a VPN.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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
| infecto wrote:
| 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.
| withinrafael wrote:
| 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?
| infecto wrote:
| Maybe you're not using the US entry path.
|
| https://polymarket.com/usa
|
| But also it's not illegal for a US citizen even before it
| was simply not legal for them to do business with US
| citizens because of lack of kyc
| clayhacks wrote:
| Someone needs to make a market on whether or not this is
| profitable
| zaik wrote:
| What happens when the bot places a huge bet on "No" in this
| market?
| krashidov wrote:
| Isn't this just picking up pennies on an active railroad track?
| You'll win small bets and then get run over once a long tail
| event completely wipes you out.
| _3u10 wrote:
| If you bet it all on one event yes, otherwise long tail just
| loses your bet. Downside risk is limited to your bet.
| achandra03 wrote:
| 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)
| dnnddidiej wrote:
| Betteridge's Bet
| unreal37 wrote:
| Some things always happen too. You need to avoid certain terms.
| dsmurrell wrote:
| When you win you win small but when you lose you lose big? :)
| Toxygene wrote:
| The idea was kind of amusing until I went to the GitHub page and
| was greeted with a Chudjak [1].
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Crusius#In_popular_cul...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-04-13 23:00 UTC)