The WSJ ran an earlier article stating that unless you have access to a lot of data, computing power, and statisticians, you're going to lose on those bets.
There are other things as well, like they control which side wins, so they can leverage trade or even swing trade internally with a few bot accounts, not saying that they do but I don't see a ToC that says they can't.
They don't control which side wins (UMA voters do). You should read up about prediction markets and in general sport gambling. Sport gambling platforms with a "house" usually derive their odds from pvp markets. Polymarket is similar to a classic order book market.
I have a lot of experience with similar systems, that's what we call rigging the election.
Imagine a handful of anonymous UMA wallets dominate Polymarket’s contested resolutions, and reporters have linked some deciding wallets to positions in the very markets they judged.
:But you don't have to it happens way too often and there is no oversight against it: https://www.wsj.com/finance/polymarket-bet-disputes-fb1b8c6a https://www.barrons.com/articles/polymarket-prediction-marke...
I hope we can all agree to read this stuff.
> Polymarket can market-make, but so can you (i.e be on the both sides of the order book). You can't do that in a casino for instance.
That's like saying Elon can be a trillionaire, but so can you, I mean sure, anyone can, but how lucky do you think you have to be for your market to actually get any meaningful traction and for you to make any money. And even when you do, you are basically suggesting you should insider trade or rig bets to make money... I am certain that might be a flex for some but man I don't think that's the dunk you were looking for.
At the end the only folks making money are the markets, but who am I to stop the blind. Best of luck, hopefully you don't regret it. I only hope people don't get addicted or robbed by this stuff, rich people can have their own fun I don't really care.
Maybe only allow people to spend 1/5 their pool of cash per bet so it never reaches zero
Your strategic consideration is wise, though. 'Diversification' is one of the first things people will teach wrt investment literacy.
And regarding your comment about investment literacy yes I agree with you but just to be clear we are discussing gambling and not investing.
Where's the demarcation? The whole point of this sub-thread was "you absolutely can predict the outcome of some of these markets". If you do your due dilligence/leverage your domain knowledge to buy a thing you expect to pay dividends at a later date, how is that not investing? Are government bonds gambling in your thinking?
Your prior about people acting unwise is still sneaking in via the assertion that we are talking about gambling.
I never said that you said that, so now you are just arguing with a straw man that you just created, and your lack of ability to understand that is going to make a productive conversation impossible. Good luck with your gambling.
Your brain has just had your mental block up very obviously starting from your knee-jerk "what is wrong with you?" comment, isolating you from the scary prospect of being convinced by a consistent chain of logic, and now you're looking for a face-saving way of ejecting from the conversation.
There are no easy questions, the difficulty is set by the skill/investment level of your competition.
Let's say I am quite sure that the Steam Machine will cost more than $700 dollars, and I buy a 'yes' lot for 65 cents on the payed-out dollar, those are the odds at my buy-in time.
Where exactly now do the other participants' bets on the same market influence my chance to win/lose? How am I up against them and not the question "will my prediction come true"?
Sure, before my buy-in the odds, and thus the value fluctuate on account of the market movements, but once I'm in I'm in?
In a perfect market that everyone participates in and in which everyone has perfect information, but not down here in messy reality. Your logic would have you you seeing a dollar on the ground and without further investigation go "Oh that can't be real, if it were someone would have picked it up already!" Or refusing to play chess against anyone because Magnus Carlsen could beat you.
Prediction markets are worse, both on the surface and by the actual statistics. The house takes an enormous cut, and then you have the issue of trading against insiders. Only an absolute rube would put money into a market rife with insiders, when they don't have comparable information. And the statistics bear this out. Something like 80% of all profits are captured by the top 1% of profitable users, which are only 30% of the total user base.
Anyone who thinks they will consistently make sound bets in these platforms without actually having private knowledge is a complete fool.
I am intentionally flattening these trades to simple win/loss affairs(not just for the sake of this argument).
You're playing the game at a higher level and "complaining" at the increased complexity(I don't mean to say you are complaining, I just couldn't think of a better word). You're talkkng about the 80% that get you the last 20%, I'm talking about the 20% that get me the 80.
So you could see how the face odds are irrelevant to me, only my internal yes/no intuition? Obviously this is not optimized, opportunity cost etc etc, but is there a big hole in my thinking you could point me in the direction of?