alt Hacker NewsNothing Ever Happens: Polymarket bot that always buys No on non-sports markets
Comments
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Related: https://www.jbecker.dev/research/prediction-market-microstru... (previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46680515)
Basically, realized vol is lower than implied vol over time. Yes.
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)
Someone needs to make a market on whether or not this is profitable
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.)
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).
Polymarket already has "Nothing Ever Happens" markets where you can bet on a set of events all not happening together. Because why not.
Very cool. The opposite of the black swan or turkey corollary. Every day the turkey gets fed and is happy until Thanksgiving rolls around.
> Heroku Workflow The shell helpers use either an explicit app name argument or HEROKU_APP_NAME.
nice to see heroku still alive...
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?
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.
What's the data situation like if you wanted to backtest a model like this? Is it easily accessible?
null hypothesis bot
Betteridge's Bet
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
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.
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.
I saw the Twitter meme and knew instantly he was going to be a good follow. Was not disappointed!
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