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

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?

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.

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/

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

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

Back up

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.

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

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. 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.

Edit: Another thing, betting on the overdog in sports markets actually looked 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. Just like the author, I was excluding sports at first.