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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.