I've been quite successful trading weather prediction markets.
The prediction markets were never about predicting outcomes. If that's the level you are playing on, you're playing at the lowest possible level, and probably won't win.
The markets are now about properly modelling other peoples' manipulation of prediction. That's how Wall Street works as well. Companies can beat earnings and their stocks crash immediately after. It makes zero sense if you just model companies. It makes full sense if you stochastically model how an ensemble of humans behave under incentives and human-written bots behave under human-written policies.
"Hairdryer sometimes get pointed at the weather sensor" and "Government sometimes fudges jobs/CPI data" are more or less the same thing. Build it into your model. That's the level you need to play on to profit in these markets. It's not that different from how a chess engine works.
I am getting into trading on my own (my main job was in machine learning and I studied math in university). I've also come to a similar conclusion that you pretty much have to model these "manipulations" on top of the statistics/Brownian-motion-driven behavior of any security. I am currently working on a hybrid model for something on Polymarket but it's not yet sophisticated. Do you have any resources that you can point me to that expand on this very idea of adding human behavior to financial modeling?
Without giving away my exact strategies, I'm also an ML engineer and I'll just say that ML is in 90% of cases the wrong tool, whereas simple regressions and scatter plots will unearth loads of statistical anomalies if you know where to look. You want to find anomalous behavior then hone in on how to make them your counterparty.
ML can help you optimize things after that, but locating diamonds in a soup of noise is not really where ML shines.
> "Hairdryer sometimes get pointed at the weather sensor" and "Government sometimes fudges jobs/CPI data" are more or less the same thing. Build it into your model.
Is this comment satire? Bet on things being intentionally and secretly manipulated by people you will never meet? In what direction? This just sounds like a recipe for participating in the most financially dangerous questions.
Says "prediction markets were never about predicting outcomes", writes long winded tripe stating that "prediction markets exactly about predicting outcomes". Thank you Tai Lopez.
I don’t understand why these bets are allowed at all. Can one just make an account there and bet in anything?
The whole “prediction market” charade is increasingly proving to lend itself to abuse. I hope regulations catch up with it soon, otherwise more shenanigans will follow.
The problem is that the genie is out of the bottle, even if you try to regulate it away it pops up in offshore jurisdictions and uses crypto. The ease with which polymarket can be manipulated is infinite because there are so many different random things you can bet on. It's a sign of our times and I don't think there is much that can be done about it by anyone.
This vastly increases the barrier to entry for the normal person though. Is your position that just because laws don't work 100% of the time we shouldn't bother with them?
But wow what a useless way of conversing that is. They asked because it's unclear what you're implying. So could you please clarify if you think regulation would be useful? Or should be done despite being futile? Or shouldn't be done? I can only think of those three answers, is there another?
I think smart policy would be a good start. I just made a comment on the sign of our times. I could have worded my one line reply better. I do think it will be difficult to regulate as I don't see a political appetite to do so. Maybe some countries will get it right.
For the record, I do agree with this perspective at least from an external observer of the US. Many places already regulate these types of gambling much better. What I mostly took issue with is what I read to be a resolute throwing up of the hands of any action being useless.
It is indeed unfortunate that the level of corruption in the current US administration likely precludes any action on it in the current term.
Bans from the AppStores will go a long way to removing this behavior.
Sure a few die hards will always find a way to gamble, that does not mean we should not have regulations for the majority.
> It's a sign of our times and I don't think there is much that can be done about it by anyone.
Isn't cryptocurrency (for the most part) very traceable? If you make it too hard and risky for most people to participate in, you'll limit the negative effects. You could probably quite effectively discourage it by sanctioning any transactions with one of these markets, you've got some opportunity because at some point the cryptocurrency needs to be converted to/from cash.
Of course, you'd have to dedicate some investigative and enforcement resources to the effort.
If to bet on a prediction market you have to both use a VPN and launder your money like you're a drug dealer, and I don't think many people would do it.
> Isn't cryptocurrency (for the most part) very traceable
Mostly no. If you're connected it to a banking account, or other KYC platform, maybe, but the folks capable of doing that are part of the same administration supposedly doing the manipulation, so they would not investigate themselves.
Indeed, they are actually fighting against those trying to regulate it [0]
Indeed, the president's son works for Polymarket, and has invested in it [1]
>> Isn't cryptocurrency (for the most part) very traceable
> Mostly no. If you're connected it to a banking account, or other KYC platform, maybe,
But if you're (say) and American betting on it, the money almost certainly flows through one of those entities. And if you're using bitcoin the ledger is totally public, so you could track it from Coinbase (KYC) to whatever wallet the prediction market is using to accept payment (or vice versa).
> Indeed, they are actually fighting against those trying to regulate it [0]
Choosing to "do something about it" or not is a different question than can something be done at all. I was addressing the latter.
How can I, an ordinary person, track it from Coinbase (KYC) to whatever wallet the prediction market is using to accept payment (or vice versa)." in order to link a real identity to a prediction market identity?
I don't have access to that. The government which has access to that is the very government making money doing this, so would not investigate itself.
If your question was purely technical, the answer is maybe, depending on the exchange flow. e.g. Maybe it was exchanged through Monero along the way or something, then the answer might be closer to "no".
> How can I, an ordinary person, track it from Coinbase (KYC) to whatever wallet the prediction market is using to accept payment (or vice versa)." in order to link a real identity to a prediction market identity?
KYC data is certainly confidential.
> The government which has access to that is the very government making money doing this, so would not investigate itself.
I'm not obsessed with the Trump administration, so let's not make everything about them, OK? There are other governments in the world and there will be other administrations in the US in the future. I would like to talk about prediction markets in general.
Again, if your question was purely technical, the answer is "maybe", depending on the exchange flow. e.g. Maybe it was exchanged through Monero along the way or something, then the answer might be closer to "no".
If your question was asking about a practical, realistic possibility of this being done, then your weird fixation on the trump administration aside, the answer is "no".
We seem to be seeing the repetition of every stock/securities fraud that led to the creation of the SEC. But we're seeing people who refuse to let any reasonable regulation to happen.
As Ukrainian I find bets if some city would be captured - peak degeneracy. People are being sent to die or protecting their homes should not be someone bet.
Anything on the site? Yes. Anything at all? No - Polymarket themselves make the markets (and I think they have some partners that can make markets as well, but point is some random user cannot make a market).
You absolutely can market make on Polymarket. The barrier to entry is actually extremely low; you can do it from an AWS instance in Dublin (the closest non-geo-restricted region to the Polymarket exchange), and don't need the kind of infra that is needed to market-make on US stocks. Retail can absolutely do it on anything crypto-based.
In order to market make, you just need to price probabilities better than everyone else. That's it.
On Wall Street on the other hand it has come down to FPGAs and free space microwave links because fiber optics' index of refraction causes a ~31% reduction in the speed of light. If you don't have millions of dollars you can't get into that game. Over-regulation cas resulted in this space being only accessible to the ultra-rich.
I'll steelman it: previously there was no monetary gain to be made by messing with weather sensors. A market like this creates one, creating an externality on owners of weather sensors, on enforcers and courts to investigate and prosecute novel crimes. Administration of taxes on such markets to compensate all the disparate factions harmed by the externalities exceeds the amount which could be collected, so banning is the only proper solution.
> A market like this creates one, creating an externality on owners of weather sensors, on enforcers and courts to investigate and prosecute
I am only half-joking, but this gave me an idea for how to finally get the local courts+LEO near me to get off their asses and actually do some law enforcement and prosecuting - I just gotta create prediction markets on the crimes occuring in public in my neighborhood.
The article articulated this enough, I thought but I guess not.
They're interfering with officially gathered data, used to forecast the weather. And they're not just gambling. They're also gaming the system to make money on it. This goes far beyond 'just gambling'.
>They're interfering with officially gathered data, used to forecast the weather.
If that's illegal they should be prosecuted for that. Luxury goods create incentive for theft, but nobody suggests luxury goods stores should be banned to reduce the amount of theft.
Could you regulate the sale of luxury goods meaningfully without having negative impacts on necessary markets? Can you say the same about prediction markets?
There's a reason we don't have markets to bet on whether someone will be killed, or to create a profit motive for people close to the White House to spill the beans.
There's plenty of legal avenues for the next administration to outright shut these firms down
I recommend thinking about the issue for yourself. It's not hard to see why prediction markets are subject to abuse. Market regulation has little to do with morality or "moral rights". Would I be correct in assuming you're an Ayn Rand fan?
Yep, you can bet on anything. Mike Selig is in charge of regulating it, and he's pretty zealous about suing any state regulators trying to exercise their right to regulate gambling. I think the days of the wild west are clearly numbered, but one guy with a burning passion and a big agenda (and the backing of Don Jr) can get a lot done in the meantime
There are communities larger than you'd expect around just about every topic imaginable. I'm certain there are temperature enthusiast groups, especially given its adjacency to climate stuff. It's probably going to be people mostly betting on something they have better than average knowledge of. I'd be interesting to compare the 'normal' majority temperature predictions from polymarket to local weather station predictions. I'm betting polymarket wins, by a wide margin.
For instance chess wagers on polymarket are super interesting because it's far more informative than a chess engine, even though engines are much stronger than any human. The nuance is that engines don't appreciate human factors like how easy/hard a position is to play. And so an engine might just say 'dead draw', whereas a strong human can say 'nah, white has very good winning chances here' - and the polymarket wagers end up reflecting that. And so there it's mostly strong players making money from people who think turning on their engine and betting based on what it says is something nobody else must have thought of.
It sounds like the other side of the bet was the actual winning bet when compared to Truth. Maybe they have great climate models and actually make a bet that they have an edge on. Maybe they have a gambling problem. Either way, they are the victims here.
People bet on anything and everything, and the less controllable the better, afaict. "I'll bet you $5 that snail will eat the cucumber before the broccoli" - > "fuck yes, make it $20" is 100% a thing I could see happening. Weather is significantly easier to do every day though, unless you know a snail farmer with a twitch stream (if so, hook me up!).
You're wrong. The big prediction markets (Polymarket, Kalshi) employ in-house market makers and contractors. They provide liquidity for less-active contracts. They generally are not profitable.
Why do you think it’s a nonstarter when so many of these new platforms do commit fraud all the time and get away with it? It’s only a problem if they get caught, and then only if people actually pay attention enough to care
It’s not really a bug - it’s a feature. Casino software is designed from the ground up to keep players engaged for as long as possible, which is where all those retention and engagement mechanics come from. It’s also important to understand that the “house edge” isn’t about luck - it’s pure math built into the algorithms (RTP, volatility, etc.). At the same time, a lot depends on the operator. Different providers offer different levels of flexibility, and the casino owner ultimately decides what kind of conditions to offer players. Here’s a solid breakdown on why platform flexibility matters and how it’s used in practice: https://thetradable.com/press-releases/why-flexibility-and-s...
So? There’s no game with payout odds in your favor.
Lotto (at least where I live) also shows the odds, which are always ridiculously low. Still, people play, because the human brain isn’t built to understand odds. It’s essentially worthless as a metric.
