| ▲ | SamTinnerholm 3 hours ago |
| Nice paper, and thanks for releasing the dataset. The "top-1% winners are patient limit-order liquidity providers, not insiders" finding is interesting, and I'd love to see it extended cross-venue. I work on tooling that normalizes orderbooks across Polymarket, Kalshi, Limitless, and Smarkets. From that angle, a lot of what looks locally like skilled Polymarket market-making turns out to be cross-venue arbitrage that happens to land on Polymarket. The same underlying question routinely trades 3-8% apart across venues for hours at meaningful depth, and a fast multi-venue stack rests limits on the lagging book at the exact moments the leading book moves. Locally that's indistinguishable from disciplined liquidity provision; cross-venue it's closer to FX triangular arb on the consensus price. If your timestamps are fine-grained enough, a clean follow-up: for the top 1% of Polymarket profit-takers, what fraction of fills land within N seconds of a same-question move on Kalshi or Limitless? If it's materially above baseline, some of "skill" resolves into "cross-venue infrastructure" — which is also a more durable edge than within-venue alpha, so it could partly explain the weak monthly persistence you observe (the cross-venue gap closes when too many players run the same stack). This might also be consistent with your insider-trading conclusion rather than against it: an insider on a real-world event has every reason to hit the lowest-friction venue with aggressive market orders (Polymarket: permissionless wallets, no KYC, no withdrawal limits). That's a fundamentally different profile from the patient limit-posting strategy your top bucket runs, so the two populations cleanly separate in the data even if both are present. |
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| ▲ | vcf 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| We have a grad student working on matching markets across venues. Not a trivial task at scale, but we hope to look at that eventually. |
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| ▲ | postflopclarity 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| this comment was clearly written by AI. please don't do that. |
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| ▲ | Retr0id an hour ago | parent [-] | | Not sure why you were downvoted/flagged, because you're right. It is also quite an insightful comment worthy of discussion so I'm a little conflicted. | | |
| ▲ | pjc50 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | It looks completely fine and plausible to me. Which is worrying. | |
| ▲ | skybrian an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | I don’t see why it’s AI, but even if it is, it’s better than most human comments so the complaint should be downvoted. | | |
| ▲ | Retr0id an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Take a look at the user's history, it's more obvious in context. It has a lot of claude-specific tells which are noticeable if you've spent time working with claude. AI-generated comments are against the HN guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated | | |
| ▲ | nh23423fefe an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | phrenology | | |
| ▲ | postflopclarity an hour ago | parent [-] | | if you're not able to tell that OP's comment was AI slop, then you probably don't have much insight to contribute to the conversation either. |
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| ▲ | skybrian an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Maybe the guidelines should be changed? Something about: don’t complain about comments just because they’re AI. | | |
| ▲ | postflopclarity an hour ago | parent [-] | | I'm not complaining "just" because it's AI. I'm complaining because it's AI, and also slop. > resolves into "cross-venue infrastructure" — which is also a more durable edge than within-venue alpha anybody who actually trades knows that on these markets, "cross venue infrastructure" (aka vibe coding some exchange api integrations) is much less important / durable than actual alpha. | | |
| ▲ | Retr0id 23 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Slop aside, do you think it's reasonable to assume a decent fraction of those making consistent profits are arbitrage bots? | |
| ▲ | skybrian 19 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | That sounds plausible. Not a trader so I wouldn't know. Saying at least a little about what's actually wrong with it seems more useful than just saying it's slop, which gives me very little info over just a downvote. |
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| ▲ | postflopclarity 44 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | it's only "better than human comments" if you have no idea what profitable trading looks like. it's a very-very thin mildly convincing veneer over what is fundamentally slop. |
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| ▲ | 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | locallost 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I don't think that's surprising because the alternative would be that some people are able to predict the future. Whatever strategy one might figure out that works is long term destined to fail, as other people start using them. The only real way to make money there is by providing liquidity since it's a zero sum game. For the stock market this is not true because it's not zero sum, it grows over time. |
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| ▲ | tsimionescu 8 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | There are some bets on prediction markets where the future is either already known or in the control of people who may be participating in the market. For example, when people bet on how long the next presidential briefing will be, it doesn't take a prophet to predict this, anyone who organizes said briefing can control it (at least with a very high probability). So, the question becomes "what is the preponderence of such bets" and "how many people with control or knowledge of bet outcomes actually participate in the market" - not "can some people see the future of any bet better than others". | |
| ▲ | cortesoft an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There is alternative to being “able to predict the future”, which is “I already know the future” or “I can change the future” | | |
| ▲ | mathgradthrow 36 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Someone flips a coin and looks at it, what orders are you willing to put in? The potential for insiders should be represented by a complete loss of liquidity. | | |
| ▲ | tsimionescu 7 minutes ago | parent [-] | | And yet, many people bet on things like the duration or contents of press conferences, of pre-taped shows, etc. |
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| ▲ | Retr0id 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | "predicting the future" and "correct analysis of all available information" often aren't all that different. | | |
| ▲ | glitchc an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | A sufficiently large market is indistinguishable from Brownian motion. | | | |
| ▲ | AnimalMuppet an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | From Schlock Mercenary (quoted from memory, may be inexact): "You cannot see the future. All we are given is the present." "Of course. But if you look closely at the present, you can find loose bits of the future just laying around." | |
| ▲ | dheera an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Not really. Not all players in prediction markets are rational players. A good chunk of it are there for entertainment, and analyze things incorrectly; you can take the other side of those trades, and you won't need to predict the future. | | |
| ▲ | Retr0id 12 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Deciding that someone else's prediction is wrong is a prediction in and of itself. | | |
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| ▲ | vcf 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yes, but the alternative (that some people are very good at forecasting) is also plausible. It's also useful to have a good prediction model and timely data sources when providing liquidity. We also find that some of the "biggest losers" also provide liquidity; they just aren't as good at it. | |
| ▲ | dheera an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | The stock market is arguably zero sum as well, just that directionally betting on the US has generally worked during the golden years of the US economy. The stock markets of the world aren't a money printer. | | |
| ▲ | cluckindan 6 minutes ago | parent [-] | | They can be in cases where investment lenders don’t have 100% capital requirements, but that’s generally no different from other banks. |
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| ▲ | empath75 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| There's probably also some hedging going on across accounts that look like directional bets. |