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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

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)

"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.

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.

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.

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.

Well, that's why things aren't priced uniformly, isn't it?

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)

If you bet it all on one event yes, otherwise long tail just loses your bet. Downside risk is limited to your bet.

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

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.

also people overpay for skew protection and you can make consistent money selling skews (until that one time it blows up on you)

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

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/

"Nothing ever happens"

Benjamin, huh?

Cryptocurrency. Even if it is a traceable crypto like usdt, it doesn't seem to be enforced.

> 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

Idk if there is new KYC I dont know about, but you just needed a VPN.

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.

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.

Turkey reported high winrate until Thanksgiving

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

"Nothing ever happens" ETF

Back up

GitHub is down yet again. Guess they forgot to tell their AI “make no mistakes” while vibecoding.

I love heroku, death to vercel

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

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.

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."

Well, it's not making money, for one.

Because they are doing it for fun?

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.

for the lulz obviously

you wouldn't get it