I had a thesis two months ago that you could detect predictors with insider knowledge and ride their coat tails and spent some amount of time staring at the data and running some ML algos to detect them. I learned some things about the market during this time, but did not succeed in my detection algorithm.
* Polymarket is a bit more transparent with who placed what bet, so it's a good place to go to study winners.
* The most consistent Polymarket winner I saw was placing 95%+ odds many, many times a day.
* Most markets will have a surprisingly small liquidity, so if your edge is just 5% you won't make as much as a 5% edge in the stock market could make you. This is good in that it keeps the biggest fish out, but some big players seem to be using strategies based on holding the most chips.
* Paper trading in Polymarket/Kalshi is very different than paper trading in the stock market, because even a few grand in Polymarket/Kalshi can have a big impact in how other "traders" interact with you. The traditional paper trade validation -> unleash the bot strategy doesn't work. You need to real trade with real money and scale up while watching how the market responds.
EDIT: Bonus learning -- yes the market runs by getting fish into the system. That's why Kalshi is advertising so much, it attracts suckers for the professional to win from, all while Kalshi takes a percentage.
I used to work for a sports betting company that identified individuals who were a little too good. The key is to remember that they are addicts and will bet on events regardless of if they have insider knowledge or not, so you have to account for this and not only identify the individuals with insider knowledge, but also what events they have that knowledge about and what they don't.
I used to play penny stocks for fun and it was a blast to be doing $3000 trades and be responsible for 30% of the volume for the day. You can learn a lot about how markets work if you adopt a penny stock, particularly the kind that trades in a wide range where you can buy in at 0.03 and figure "I'll sell when it hits 0.12" and sooner or later it does... then falls back down to 0.02.
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.
Like any kind of gambling you have to do it with money you can't afford to lose and if you want exposure to stocks it is hard to say that you shouldn't have a big chunk of your savings in something like $QQQ or $VOO.
Myself I was working on finance-adjacent stuff at the time and thought it had educational value. I did OK trading my favorite penny stock but I've had my share of financial misadventures, like I just had to buy $XIV because I wanted to see what happened and... I did.
This is the trap of modern society. Think about what you're doing: instead of anything productive, you thought a good use of your time was sitting there staring at numbers, hoping to find a pattern to make money off of people; who in their own right are using insider information to game a system; which itself is set up to capitalize off the fact that the larger economy has failed, and now all that's left is to just make money off of guessing.
> I learned some things about the market during this time, but did not succeed in my detection algorithm.
What failed? Was it too late to follow the trend by the time one was identified or something else? It seems much more transparent than trying to reason about say dark pool trades.
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 whole prediction market space seems like a 2026 version of ball and cup game betting. Most of the people participating fail to understand that they (and their pointless bets up for harvesting) are the product here.
My intuition is that it is a lot like sports betting: many laypeople bet for what they hope will happen, rather than trying to beat the market earnestly.
The winners, as you point out, are the house and those with insider knowledge.
Prediction markets are nothing more than gambling. Most people who gamble end up losing. If it were otherwise, running a gambling operation wouldn't be the enormously profitable endeavor that it is.
I ran the earliest predictions market online at the reboot of The Industry Standard.
Prediction markets fatally suffer from two
Problems.
1) large sharks making huge bets at the end (destroying any signal from earlier bets)
2) inside information on poorly written bets.
The solution is parlay style payouts but that destroys popularity (you are paid out at closing odds not at your time of bet odds spread to sell position).
> On Kalshi, too, losers vastly outnumber winners. Spokeswoman Elisabeth Diana said there are 2.9 unprofitable users for each profitable one based on data from the past month
So 25% of users are profitable? That's vastly more than on financial sites - stocks/futures/forex/options trading where only 5% of bettors are profitable.
> vastly more than on financial sites - stocks/futures/forex/options trading where only 5% of bettors are profitable
Source? I'm not doubting that there are products and forums where 95% of traders lose money. But that's far from representative for most financial-market participants.
All those other markets are vastly bigger in scale and trade in trillions on a daily basis so it's an irrelevant comparison. Also the expectation is that the majority of that 25% are insiders. So you're comparing catching fish in a barrel where 25% of the participants hooked the fish prior to you getting a turn vs fishing in the open ocean (so 5% is pretty good with additional voting rights/tax benefits).
If you're buying an index fund, you're buying because you'd like to see your money grow in a predictable, sustainable manner.
If you're "investing" in a prediction market, you're "investing" because the alternative is going to your local casino, breathing in unholy amounts of cigarette smoke, and getting into a scuffle with a senior gambling their OASDI check over which slot machine you're sitting at.
And that's just not something most tech bro types are interested in. It screams "loser", not "value creation and market disruption wunderkind".
Not only that, huge UMA tokens holders can also rig some bets on a technicality without much effort, especially since big UMA token holders seems to know each others. If you bet against Zelansky wearing a suit to meet Trump, and that by all account, he seemed to be wearing a suit, but you don't want to loose the bet, the "Oracle"/UMA holders can decide that it wasn't, in fact, a suit, and your bet will win.
People keep saying they provide the market with information, and that's the benefit of allowing the insider trading, but no one has pointed out how in any way society has benefitted from the insider trading instances so far...
The answer is pretty obvious, right? It doesn’t reliably deliver on that promise, and in the meantime they rake billions on unregulated gambling with near zero institutional exposure.
It's useful for things like elections, where though popular media might push one line of thought primarily, the markets will adjust to be closer to the reality. Pretty visible in the 2024 elections where if you followed mainstream media at all, you probably wouldn't realize the markets had Trump at a 60% chance to win just before the election.
But for so many things, there's just too many sources of insider info. Reality television especially, the last couple seasons of Survivor have been clearly leaked if you look at a prediction market. And since all of production knows, and obviously all the players know, someone tells their family members, and all of a sudden you have a few hundred people who know for sure who will win.
> "John Pederson outside the homeless shelter in Detroit where he has been living since losing money on Kalshi...Pederson lost $41,000 on a mention-market bet related to hip-hop artist A$AP Rocky in January"
I'm not a gambler, but when I consider it I think the worst thing that could happen to me would be to win a substantial but not life-changing amount of money. I think that's where most people get hooked. They get lucky once (or a few times), then get completely sucked in trying to replicate that success.
I had a thesis two months ago that you could detect predictors with insider knowledge and ride their coat tails and spent some amount of time staring at the data and running some ML algos to detect them. I learned some things about the market during this time, but did not succeed in my detection algorithm.
* Polymarket is a bit more transparent with who placed what bet, so it's a good place to go to study winners.
* The most consistent Polymarket winner I saw was placing 95%+ odds many, many times a day.
* Most markets will have a surprisingly small liquidity, so if your edge is just 5% you won't make as much as a 5% edge in the stock market could make you. This is good in that it keeps the biggest fish out, but some big players seem to be using strategies based on holding the most chips.
* Paper trading in Polymarket/Kalshi is very different than paper trading in the stock market, because even a few grand in Polymarket/Kalshi can have a big impact in how other "traders" interact with you. The traditional paper trade validation -> unleash the bot strategy doesn't work. You need to real trade with real money and scale up while watching how the market responds.
EDIT: Bonus learning -- yes the market runs by getting fish into the system. That's why Kalshi is advertising so much, it attracts suckers for the professional to win from, all while Kalshi takes a percentage.
I used to work for a sports betting company that identified individuals who were a little too good. The key is to remember that they are addicts and will bet on events regardless of if they have insider knowledge or not, so you have to account for this and not only identify the individuals with insider knowledge, but also what events they have that knowledge about and what they don't.
I used to play penny stocks for fun and it was a blast to be doing $3000 trades and be responsible for 30% of the volume for the day. You can learn a lot about how markets work if you adopt a penny stock, particularly the kind that trades in a wide range where you can buy in at 0.03 and figure "I'll sell when it hits 0.12" and sooner or later it does... then falls back down to 0.02.
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.
Like any kind of gambling you have to do it with money you can't afford to lose and if you want exposure to stocks it is hard to say that you shouldn't have a big chunk of your savings in something like $QQQ or $VOO.
Myself I was working on finance-adjacent stuff at the time and thought it had educational value. I did OK trading my favorite penny stock but I've had my share of financial misadventures, like I just had to buy $XIV because I wanted to see what happened and... I did.
This is the trap of modern society. Think about what you're doing: instead of anything productive, you thought a good use of your time was sitting there staring at numbers, hoping to find a pattern to make money off of people; who in their own right are using insider information to game a system; which itself is set up to capitalize off the fact that the larger economy has failed, and now all that's left is to just make money off of guessing.
> I learned some things about the market during this time, but did not succeed in my detection algorithm.
What failed? Was it too late to follow the trend by the time one was identified or something else? It seems much more transparent than trying to reason about say dark pool trades.
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 whole prediction market space seems like a 2026 version of ball and cup game betting. Most of the people participating fail to understand that they (and their pointless bets up for harvesting) are the product here.
My intuition is that it is a lot like sports betting: many laypeople bet for what they hope will happen, rather than trying to beat the market earnestly.
The winners, as you point out, are the house and those with insider knowledge.
... like a horse that is held back for a while and comes in at 23-1.a
Prediction markets are nothing more than gambling. Most people who gamble end up losing. If it were otherwise, running a gambling operation wouldn't be the enormously profitable endeavor that it is.
On a related note:
"Someone allegedly used a hairdryer to rig Polymarket weather bets" https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/someone-allegedly-used-a-h...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48008326
Alternative is archive.is
Text-only, no Javascript, no CAPTCHA, no DDoS on blog, no geo-blocking, HTTPS optional:
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA22jnEi...
https://archive.is/7DSiy
Prediction markets are astrology for the boys.
Astrology is magical thinking and fraud so it checks out.
Astrology is more of a cost centre than a gambling venue, unless you consider choosing a life partner based on the stars.
Cuz that's how gambling's supposed to work.
I ran the earliest predictions market online at the reboot of The Industry Standard.
Prediction markets fatally suffer from two Problems.
1) large sharks making huge bets at the end (destroying any signal from earlier bets)
2) inside information on poorly written bets.
The solution is parlay style payouts but that destroys popularity (you are paid out at closing odds not at your time of bet odds spread to sell position).
"The solution is parlay style payouts"
I think you mean parimutuel payouts?
> On Kalshi, too, losers vastly outnumber winners. Spokeswoman Elisabeth Diana said there are 2.9 unprofitable users for each profitable one based on data from the past month
So 25% of users are profitable? That's vastly more than on financial sites - stocks/futures/forex/options trading where only 5% of bettors are profitable.
Are you confusing beating the market with being profitable?
The majority of active traders won't beat the market (e.g. the S&P 500). That doesn't mean they aren't profitable.
> vastly more than on financial sites - stocks/futures/forex/options trading where only 5% of bettors are profitable
Source? I'm not doubting that there are products and forums where 95% of traders lose money. But that's far from representative for most financial-market participants.
All those other markets are vastly bigger in scale and trade in trillions on a daily basis so it's an irrelevant comparison. Also the expectation is that the majority of that 25% are insiders. So you're comparing catching fish in a barrel where 25% of the participants hooked the fish prior to you getting a turn vs fishing in the open ocean (so 5% is pretty good with additional voting rights/tax benefits).
Uhm, I'd like to introduce you to our Lord and Savior index funds. Simply buy vtsax and forget for 30 years.
Maybe switch to European markets? Significantly more uncertainty and less stability around the US.
If you're buying an index fund, you're buying because you'd like to see your money grow in a predictable, sustainable manner.
If you're "investing" in a prediction market, you're "investing" because the alternative is going to your local casino, breathing in unholy amounts of cigarette smoke, and getting into a scuffle with a senior gambling their OASDI check over which slot machine you're sitting at.
And that's just not something most tech bro types are interested in. It screams "loser", not "value creation and market disruption wunderkind".
If by "sharks" you mean "inside traders" then yes.
Not only that, huge UMA tokens holders can also rig some bets on a technicality without much effort, especially since big UMA token holders seems to know each others. If you bet against Zelansky wearing a suit to meet Trump, and that by all account, he seemed to be wearing a suit, but you don't want to loose the bet, the "Oracle"/UMA holders can decide that it wasn't, in fact, a suit, and your bet will win.
I took it to be like a pool shark. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_cue_sports_terms#s...
Yes, that'd be the grammatically correct use. But Insider trading has been rampant on the "prediction markets". In short, it's a scam, because gambling is always a scam. https://fortune.com/2026/04/26/prediction-markets-insider-tr...
People keep saying they provide the market with information, and that's the benefit of allowing the insider trading, but no one has pointed out how in any way society has benefitted from the insider trading instances so far...
The answer is pretty obvious, right? It doesn’t reliably deliver on that promise, and in the meantime they rake billions on unregulated gambling with near zero institutional exposure.
It's useful for things like elections, where though popular media might push one line of thought primarily, the markets will adjust to be closer to the reality. Pretty visible in the 2024 elections where if you followed mainstream media at all, you probably wouldn't realize the markets had Trump at a 60% chance to win just before the election.
But for so many things, there's just too many sources of insider info. Reality television especially, the last couple seasons of Survivor have been clearly leaked if you look at a prediction market. And since all of production knows, and obviously all the players know, someone tells their family members, and all of a sudden you have a few hundred people who know for sure who will win.
> "John Pederson outside the homeless shelter in Detroit where he has been living since losing money on Kalshi...Pederson lost $41,000 on a mention-market bet related to hip-hop artist A$AP Rocky in January"
> At first, it worked. Pederson turned about $2,000 into close to $8,000 by betting on daily snowfall totals in Detroit
I'm not a gambler, but when I consider it I think the worst thing that could happen to me would be to win a substantial but not life-changing amount of money. I think that's where most people get hooked. They get lucky once (or a few times), then get completely sucked in trying to replicate that success.
That particular set of circumstances is the ruin of many a lottery winner.