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I used to play penny stocks for fun and it was a blast to be doing $3000 trades and be responsible for 30% of the volume for the day. You can learn a lot about how markets work if you adopt a penny stock, particularly the kind that trades in a wide range where you can buy in at 0.03 and figure "I'll sell when it hits 0.12" and sooner or later it does... then falls back down to 0.02.

You can "trade the news" with penny stocks (this is basically just buying when people first start talking about it then selling when more people are talking about it), but like you say, the liquidity is soooooo low that you have to be really careful if you plan to sell more than a few hundred dollars.

Generally, you're going to lose money - so don't do it.

Like any kind of gambling you have to do it with money you can't afford to lose and if you want exposure to stocks it is hard to say that you shouldn't have a big chunk of your savings in something like $QQQ or $VOO.

Myself I was working on finance-adjacent stuff at the time and thought it had educational value. I did OK trading my favorite penny stock but I've had my share of financial misadventures, like I just had to buy $XIV because I wanted to see what happened and... I did.

This is interesting to me. I never had any enjoyment from traditional gambling when I dabbled in it. But I like the idea of being an expert on a little-known company and experiencng the response of my actions. Of course, it would be "for entertainment purposes only."

I was never interested in market timing, though.

I used to work for a sports betting company that identified individuals who were a little too good. The key is to remember that they are addicts and will bet on events regardless of if they have insider knowledge or not, so you have to account for this and not only identify the individuals with insider knowledge, but also what events they have that knowledge about and what they don't.

Do people here and the WSJ comprehend though that they are giving Polymarket free publicity to farm addicts?

This is like saying that "Supersize me" is free publicity for MacDonalds.

No such thing as bad publicity? I would bet that McDonalds saw an uptick in sales after the release of SSM.

every casino's business model is about get-in-the-door appeal in order to fish out a handful of very lucrative whales. polymarket included. so no they're not really comparable.

The only winners are the market makers and the ones initiating insider trading. You'll always be on the wrong is of the liquidity when trying to ride alongside scammers.

> I had a thesis two months ago that you could detect predictors with insider knowledge and ride their coat tails and spent some amount of time staring at the data and running some ML algos to detect them.

Polymarket actually wrote an article about "copycat trading": https://news.polymarket.com/p/copycat

> I learned some things about the market during this time, but did not succeed in my detection algorithm.

What failed? Was it too late to follow the trend by the time one was identified or something else? It seems much more transparent than trying to reason about say dark pool trades.

I am unfamiliar with working with such signal-to-noise ratios.

* I only had the example trades in the news as 100% confirmed positive trades.

* There are hundreds of millions of dollars in trades a day in Polymarket.

* In Polymarket you can just spin up a new account. If an account spins up, makes a $50k bet and wins, and then has no other activity, was that an insider trader or just someone with a behavioral pattern of spinning up new accounts? Just following up on these types of trades didn't provide a very big edge, as the nature of the trade adjusts the payout percentage.

> In Polymarket you can just spin up a new account. If an account spins up, makes a $50k bet and wins

You'd probably want to use some form of bayesian ranking, like say add 1k of total bets and 500 in total winnings to the raw scores.

But your bigger problem is just that people spinning up new accounts may be doing it to avoid your tracking. The kind of person with lots of evidence that they're good should be smart enough to know about copycat traders. The evilest among them might use a small bet to lure copycats and then trade against them in alts.

> The kind of person with lots of evidence that they're good

But what evidence is there that anyone is "good"? The fact that I am an insider to one event does not make me an insider to all events. If I were an insider to many events, I would probably have better ways to profit off of them. Placing a big bet is something I would do if I knew one thing.

This is the trap of modern society. Think about what you're doing: instead of anything productive, you thought a good use of your time was sitting there staring at numbers, hoping to find a pattern to make money off of people; who in their own right are using insider information to game a system; which itself is set up to capitalize off the fact that the larger economy has failed, and now all that's left is to just make money off of guessing.

True, but hx8 isn't to blame here and was simply trying an interesting experiment. Blame the system instead.

I did blame the system, I said it's the trap of modern society. The only reason hx8 fell into this trap was because they thought it would be profitable, that's not a moral failing on the part of the poster.

Finance has always been the largest sector on the planet through every economic environment you have been alive for, I don't really understand why there is a current of this community that acts so divorced from its perpetual and all encompassing existence their whole lives

Despite you being an individual, you reflect an aberration of sentiment here that makes no sense

For example, the larger economy hasn't failed, another view is that this is price discovery of a mispriced agent in the market. A wage worker whose actual productivity isn't valued accurately, and a market based solution has been developed that allows for closer accuracy. More profits to the insider and the copy trader, their available capital and liquidity is derived from their utility to the employment sector and their potential profits with that capital and liquidity is derived from the event's actual utility to the market.

Additionally, the productivity of all agents isn't known, you don't know what they were doing with their time before and it likely was suboptimal already - as in doomscrolling on social media or vegetating on the couch.

Finally, you have no way of quantifying if those lazy things were suboptimal uses of time, or if a completely active other activity was suboptimal or optimal, as this goes into relative utility and schools of ethics.

> the larger economy hasn't failed

It's only a matter of time until Social Security starts to fail, right after we've paid all the boomers their full benefits (and just in time for me to be eligible), and then they'll have to implement "austerity measures." After that, groceries, gas, housing, health "care," and higher education will have fully broken the middle class (it's already broken me, and I have a good job and a paid-off house), and the economy (sans imaginary AI investment bullshit) will be exposed as failing. AI (such as it is) will hammer entry level jobs, and tax revenues will be impacted by this. At the same time, we're going to have to start some sort of menial UBI, but with what money, I have no idea. Service on the national debt just surpassed military spending last year. When the shit hits the fan in another 10 years, the country will have to either go to war to reset the accounting ledgers, or actually put themselves on a budget. Which do you think will happen?

Given the numbers and rates we can see at present, all economic activity right now is a process of moving deck chairs on the Titanic. Sure, it hasn't failed, but it is an absolute certainly that it WILL. It's just a question of WHEN, and it's relatively soon. We have no adults in Washington. It's clear they're ALL just trying "get theirs" before it all comes crashing down.

Everything you described is future liquidity and who has it, but whether that’s the economy or enough of it to make a statement is unclear to me

And you wrote this all as a reaction to people trading on prediction markets? Markets that show velocity of transactions in a new, novel and growing way, which is the goal of our economies - to discourage hoarding in favor of transactions

Being a permabear doomer has nothing to do with the existence of prediction markets and other people’s participation in them

Social security will fail slowly by reducing its payout a little at a time.

It can’t really fail all at once unless the US government dissolves. And people have been losing money on that bet for 250 years.

Luckily, if someone thinks the USG will actually fail, it’s really easy to trade on that possibility.

When social security "fails" (which I would define as not paying out 100% of its defined benefits), the payment structure will be changed and that's the end of it.

If paying for basic living expenses and higher education for your kids has "broken you", then you either didn't have the good job you thought you did or you aren't making very sound financial decisions (or both). Given that you own a paid off house, I suspect the actual issue is a complete lack of perspective on your part as to how well you have it.

In short, the economy is not failing, you're just a doomer.

We should be happy to live in a world where a significant fraction of people can conclude that "doing something productive" is not a hard requirement for survival.

The real trap of modernity is treating "productivity" as some sort of quasi-religious moral imperative.

This comment is so patronizing because it's 2008 angst against the financial sector wrapped up in the assumption that the people participating in the financial sector aren't aware of that angst. We're deep in a hacker news comment thread, no one here should be beating the desk about productivity.

I would recommend you look into Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber, where he makes an argument that 50% of American jobs are not only not-productive, but actually harmful. Your argument isn't taken to its logical conclusion yet.

I'm well aware of "Bullshit Jobs", but that's more support for my conclusion that the modern economy has failed. Why do we have people doing bullshit jobs rather than something else? My argument is taken to its logical conclusion plenty of places in this economy, it's just not evenly distributed -- just look at the minimum wage being $7/hr juxtaposed next to an extra value mean being $12. That's a failed economy, sorry.

There's a lot I could unpack here, but I'm just going to pull on the string I find most interesting. "Why do we have people doing bullshit jobs rather than something else?"

There honestly isn't that much else left to do. Most of us in the western world are incredibly well fed, well housed, well transported, well educated, well defended, and well cared for(health/dental). Sure, all of that could be better and/or cheaper, but by historical standards we are doing incredibly well. We're engaging in all of these activities with only a fraction of the people that were spent on it in the past, and the people that are working directly in these fields are more productive than ever.

We're talking care of our societal needs with fewer people than ever before. What exactly do you expect the rest of us to do with our time and how will it be anything other than bullshit?

> There honestly isn't that much else left to do.

No, there's toooons of work to do. It sounds like you and yours are doing fine. My community is hungry, sick, lacks access to education, faces striking illiteracy, are not only not defended by but are actively attacked by local police and security forces.

> What exactly do you expect the rest of us to do with our time and how will it be anything other than bullshit?

Well there's a national childcare crisis going on where childcare costs more than a mortgage. There's also an education crisis going on where education costs more than people make in 10 years. There's a housing crisis going on where people can't into homes and are becoming forever renters. There's a healthcare crisis going on where people cannot actually afford to go to the doctor or have to ration their medications to get the care they need -- even with insurance. So my proposal would be to take people a way from doing bullshit jobs and get them into those professions to help out with those various crises.

> There honestly isn't that much else left to do.

There are so many problems in the world, you really can't think of anything that would be helped by someone well educated and motivated to work on any of those problems?

People going hungry, unhoused, traumatized, the Earth's warming, there's cancer. Getting funding for those things is also hard, but that's also a job!