Hacker News Reader

Comment by freefaler | Hacker News Reader

It's not a random chance gambling like a casino. It's more like active stock trading. Many traders (especially retail) lose money, but many make money.

Polymarket is good when you understand the situation better than the people you're betting against. And the bet you're making can be on what you know.

My first 100 USDC I've made was when the CrowdStrike news hit. I saw a bet that it was a "hack". As a programmer I knew it wasn't a hack based on the technical information I read. The bet was 70 not a hack/30 hack. I bet that is was not a hack and got 30% return for 2 days.

Many people "bet" everyday. Every resource allocation decision is a bet. Polymarket is the same. Don't bet on "what will Trump say" or "the price of BTC in a week", but there a plenty of bets where you can make a reasonable prediction and get consistent returns.

View on HN

> It's more like active stock trading.

That is also random chance gambling.

If it was, than people like Buffet, Stan Druckenmiller or Jim Simmons wouldn't exist.

They are trading and they are making bets. Simmons makes milions of them everyday :), Buffet makes 1 per month. But they are active stock traders not a passive index investors.

Well, not Jim Simons. He’s dead.

Does that matter, he managed to be living for the last 30 years creating a consistently earning quant trading fund.

There are thousands of Buffets, Stans, and Jims that don't exist.

The point is that you don't see a Buffet like figure earning consistently in random-bet casino games. If you see that there are some examples disproving the conjecture "Market is fully random and are not different than a casino roulette game". It may be uncommon, but not a fully random example.

You are skeptical of this idea because you expect to see more people like Buffet "making money by simply buying stocks" (I'm being reductive for the sake of writing, not arguing). The unspoken foundation for this assumption is that everyone is equally at the casino roulette game. That is not the case. The american wealth inequality is vast. You are seeing exactly the expected number of winners (few) given that the people at the table who can afford a majority of the loss are very few.

Stock markets are a casino gamble and the few people like Buffet are actually proof of it being a gamble.

Don't take my word for it: https://money.com/warren-buffett-stock-market-casino/#:~:tex...

There are lots of shades of random. When the three-photon photoelectric effect will happen is random, but if you can find a way to bet against it, unless the odds are ridiculously skewed, you should.

But the odds are ridiculously skewed - that's how it works. They're skewed so the house always wins, which means the customers, taken together, always lose. If everyone's betting against the three-photon photoelectric effect, you will be able to multiply your money by precisely 1.0 when your bet comes true and it doesn't happen, or maybe even 0.999.

The house here is just taking some money off the top. It doesn't really matter whether the customers, taken together, get 100% or 98% of their money back. What matters is that an individual that's a few percent more accurate than the market can make money.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com