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 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.
> 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.
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".
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...
> "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 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.
> 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.
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
https://archive.is/7DSiy
Prediction markets are astrology for the boys.
Astrology is more of a cost centre than a gambling venue, unless you consider choosing a life partner based on the stars.
Astrology is magical thinking and fraud so it checks out.
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?
If by "sharks" you mean "inside traders" then yes.
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
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".
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...
> "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.