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Comment by ambicapter | Hacker News Reader

> It's not discussed often, but the liquidity of these markets is often awful, and you can only win as much as people are willing to take the other side. Which is harder when people know it's easy for insiders (or the outcome decider themselves) to play the other side.

You're basically arguing that there aren't enough fools to go around, when we're talking about gambling enterprises.

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Not fools, these bets are usually very close to a fair market price. But people are not willing to wager millions of dollars on the temperature registered in a certain place at a certain time. Or on if hezbollah missiles impact Israel land or whatever.

The latter kind of prediction has become less desirable to bet on ever since the shenanigans around whether or not Maduro's kidnapping counted as an invasion of Venezuela.

What fair market price are you talking about? The price decided by the prediction market?

If you compare prediction market implied odds to the actual odds that ended up they match very closely

what are these "actual odds" and if you have the time machine that lets you observe the necessary outcomes to calculate them, why are you bothering with making money on betting markets?

The "actual odds" is that if you get, say, 100 bets that were at 10% yes when the bet was resolved, you'll see that around 10% closed yes and 90% closed No.

Do you have an example?

So, what you're discussing is basically, whales are going to be the bettors and it sucks that there'll always be a bunch of marks but: No ones going to stop the whales because there'll always be suckers.

Welcome to the grift economy, take a number.

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