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Nothing Ever Happens: Polymarket bot that always buys No on non-sports markets
- tekno45 6mo agoany stats on your returns so far?
- pawelduda 6mo agoTurkey reported high winrate until Thanksgiving
- vessenes 6mo agoFalling victim to the classic fallacy. So sad
- syncsynchalt 6mo agoWe call it a "black turkey event", nobody saw it coming.
- m-hodges 6mo agoNot my project, but author said on X: > Why predict the future when 73.4% of all Polymarkets resolve as No? https://x.com/sterlingcrispin/status/2043398710013595857 https://x.com/sterlingcrispin/status/2043398710013595857
- gruez 6mo agoThat logic doesn't work because not every bet have even payouts. If there's a market for whether a dice rolls 1 or not, the odds might resolve to "no" 83% of the time, but if it only pays you $1.1 per dollar wagered on "no", you're still losing money.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- wormpilled 6mo agoBasically arbitraging human imagination. People love coming up with fantastical concepts because they get attention, but the more exciting a market is, the less likely it is to actually happen. Reality is usually boring.
- nemomarx 6mo agoThis makes sense to me, but isn't there a risk of increasing the potential payoff high enough that someone is motivated to go out and make the yes side happen? Consider this bot running on us military outcomes or something.
- cryptonym 6mo agoBy design it's a game where people with inside knowledge or enough power to bend reality can steal money from people with gambling addiction. Automating your addiction might not be the best move.
- nkrisc 6mo agoThis is what markets like Polymarket boil down to. Normies can't win. Some will, of course, but that's just chance and there's no way if ensuring it's you. It's really no different than a casino: if you ever find yourself with more money than you walked in with, cash out and leave. Best strategy for most people though is to simply not participate and you'll break even.
- Bratmon 6mo agoYou say that like it's bad thing, but really it's great! It gives us normies a way to see what the powerful are thinking.
- kelvinjps10 6mo agonormies that don't enter the game, because the ones that do just loose their money
- throwaway2027 6mo agoAlready priced in.
- jp57 6mo agoExcept that the mere existence of the market with the question posed for people to consider, probably activates the availability heuristic[1], causing people to overestimate the likelihood. [1] https://philopedia.org/topics/availability-heuristic/ https://philopedia.org/topics/availability-heuristic/
- m-hodges 6mo agoThe author also noted: > yes this has to buy below 0.73 long term, the bot has a configurable ceiling set at 0.65 and checks for new markets buying closer to .5 https://x.com/sterlingcrispin/status/2043685362812461436 https://x.com/sterlingcrispin/status/2043685362812461436
- gruez 6mo agoWhat happens if you flood the market with a bunch of implausible bets like "sun won't rise tomorrow"? Sure, you might try to filter that out with some sort of "seasoning" period (ie. don't buy new markets), but then that means more time for arbitrageurs to correctly price the market, depriving you of any price advantage you might have had.
- baq 6mo agojane street is always hiring!
- Bratmon 6mo ago> What happens if you flood the market with a bunch of implausible bets like "sun won't rise tomorrow"? Who does "you" refer to in this sentence? Polymarket itself? I'm pretty sure if Polymarket itself decides it wants to screw you, you're gonna lose no natter what your strategy is.
- fer 6mo ago
- thatnerd 6mo agoI think we've collectively DDoSed it. I'm getting a 504 timeout. The author [page](https://github.com/sterlingcrispin https://github.com/sterlingcrispin) is there on github, but I can't even find his full list of his repos to confirm it's still there (I also get a 504 on that).
- nothinkjustai 6mo agoGitHub is down yet again. Guess they forgot to tell their AI “make no mistakes” while vibecoding.
- aprilnya 6mo agoI was about to say “first Microsoft service to reach zero 9s of uptime”, but then I realized, it’s Microsoft… GitHub is definitely not the first
- thatnerd 6mo agoBack up
- thetailrisk 6mo agoWhat's the data situation like if you wanted to backtest a model like this? Is it easily accessible?
- croemer 6mo agoNo, data situation is bad, at least for market making - you need to scrape the orderbook yourself to be able to do any realistic backtesting. And even then, it's hard to know whether other bids at the same price are ahead of you or behind you in the queue.
- sterlingcrispin 6mo agothis is a good dataset https://huggingface.co/datasets/SII-WANGZJ/Polymarket_data https://huggingface.co/datasets/SII-WANGZJ/Polymarket_data "A comprehensive dataset of 1.9 billion trading records from Polymarket, processed into multiple analysis-ready formats. Features cleaned data, unified token perspectives, and user-level transformations — ready for market research, behavioral studies, and quantitative analysis."
- tekno45 6mo agohttps://x.com/sterlingcrispin/status/2043723823678382254 https://x.com/sterlingcrispin/status/2043723823678382254 They admit no returns. But it does seem like a fun project and nowhere does it say anything about returns or profits so not scammy imo just funny meme backed code
- sterlingcrispin 6mo agoYes exactly. The bot has zero risk management and I have a strong disclaimer on the github it is essentially a meme. 73% of all polymarkets do resolve to No though. There's a good dataset on huggingface if you wanted to do some data science https://huggingface.co/datasets/SII-WANGZJ/Polymarket_data https://huggingface.co/datasets/SII-WANGZJ/Polymarket_data
- raincole 6mo ago> 73% of all polymarkets do resolve to No though. I wonder what it means exactly. Typical Polymarket looks like this: X happens before May. [Yes][No] X happens before June. [Yes][No] X happens before July. [Yes][No] ... So even if X ended up happens in December, it's still 12.5% Yes and 87.5% No?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- traderj0e 6mo agoThat's one event containing three markets, each yes/no. And in a way each market is two separate markets, buy/sell yes and buy/sell no, but they mirror each other.
- raincole 6mo agoI understand that. That's not my question tho. I am asking for the exact meaning of the 73% number.
- lazyasciiart 6mo ago
- hodder 6mo agoBasically, realized vol is lower than implied vol over time. Yes.
- swyx 6mo agoalso people overpay for skew protection and you can make consistent money selling skews (until that one time it blows up on you)
- nzach 6mo agoIf this seems interesting for you remember that if you are putting $100 in a 99 to 1 bet you need to win 100 times to get $100 but only need to loose 1 time to loose $100. And the chance of losing at least once in a 99% sure bet after 100 rounds is around 60%. Even if you reduce to 30 rounds it still is around 30%. This may seem smart at first glance, but the math doesn't really checks out.
- sterlingcrispin 6mo agoIn your scenario you're assuming the dice rolls are all independent. If polymarket bets were all pure dice rolls the 60% odds you quoted would be true. But they aren't independent there are a lot of correlations. Global geopolitics for example. The way the math works out, 73% of markets resolve to No, If you buy No at 0.73 each time you would break even. Not financial advice of course
- ivatalon 6mo ago[dead]
- sambaumann 6mo agoRelated: https://www.jbecker.dev/research/prediction-market-microstructure https://www.jbecker.dev/research/prediction-market-microstru... (previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46680515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46680515)
- cordwainersmith 6mo agoThe contrarian bet is fun but I wonder how it actually holds up. Prediction markets do tend to overprice dramatic outcomes, so "always bet no" isn't as dumb as it sounds. Would love to see real P&L over a few months, not just the thesis.
- traderj0e 6mo agoI've backtested this kind of strategy, and it had a good return (like 100% APR), but then I realized it was cheating by knowing when things are going to resolve. Often times it's not clear. Your return depends a lot on how quickly you can get your money out. I never got around to trying a strat that doesn't know the resolution time, which actually has to be manual cause it takes some judgement to pick things that you expect to resolve soon. Also requires a lot of volume to be "predictable" obviously, since 1 loss sets you back 10-20 wins. It's surprisingly hard to find reasonable-liquidity markets after all your filtering. Many have huge spreads or thin books. Scare quotes around "predictable" because you never know if others will use this strat or a lot of unlikely events will happen due to insiders. Another thing, just like the author, I was excluding sports in all the above. Yes Polymarket is famous for letting people bet on world events etc, but turns out it's still more about sports. Betting on the overdog in sports markets seems more appealing because there are plenty of those events with large volume, they're kinda homogenous, you know exactly when they resolve, and they're harder to rig. I simply never got around to putting real time or money into the overdog strat.
- baq 6mo ago> One loss sets you back 10-20 wins. didn't look at the numbers, but this one sentence reminds me of selling options for 'passive income' (don't do that)
- traderj0e 6mo agoI drew the same analogy. You put up $0.95, a YES gambler only puts $0.05 (ignoring spread); you're providing "insurance" in case of a YES. In theory, even if the market prices reflected the true probability of the event happening, the more expensive side should be netting some "insurance premium" on average, right? Not sure, and idk how to observe if that's happening. Polymarket is also holding onto the money in the meantime. Idk what they do with it, but it's not like some other platforms where they at least work with a bank to earn you some tiny interest on it.
- imrozim 6mo ago[dead]
- swyx 6mo ago> Heroku Workflow The shell helpers use either an explicit app name argument or HEROKU_APP_NAME. nice to see heroku still alive...
- sterlingcrispin 6mo agoI love heroku, death to vercel
- seizethecheese 6mo agoConsidering moving my team to Vercel. Why?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- logicallee 6mo agoDisclaimer: I contribute work as a political advisor and don't participate in betting markets as a market participant. Nevertheless, Polymarket is a very interesting marketplace of sentiments and information, and it can be a very strong leading indicator of huge price movements in "real" markets like the NYSE, in part because it directly measures one factor of sentiment, i.e. whatever the prediction is about. Market sentiment determines market prices on very large and deep markets, too. In the run-up to the election, when Trump was running against Biden, a betting market was a leading predictor of NASDAQ (a very deep, very liquid index of stocks). I wrote up the findings here: https://medium.com/@rviragh/does-the-stock-market-react-positively-or-negatively-to-positive-news-about-trump-053e6cce96df https://medium.com/@rviragh/does-the-stock-market-react-posi... This indicator was the best one anyone has ever shown for NASDAQ for any signal, period. The signal was so strong it trumped all other signals and variances of any kind. Traders trading with just this signal and no other signal of any kind could have made practically an unlimited amount of money as long as the signal was intact. (Basically, until Biden dropped out.) I myself didn't place any bet due to my role as a political advisor at the time, but the size of the correlation is still the biggest and most surprising one I've ever seen.
- Majromax 6mo agoWet streets cause rain? You don’t show that the Polymarket signal lead Nasdaq.
- dheera 6mo agoHonest question: Why in all hell would you open source this? I have been making money with a bot off a statistical anomaly in prediction markets lately. There is no way in hell I will open source it or tell you what that anomaly is because I have capacity back-tested it and there are so many players in the market; if all of HN and Github start downloading and use my code it WILL cease to work. Put another way, your orders are helping move the market and price the market more efficiently; that's the market compensating you for pricing things better. If a thousand people run your strategy, prices will get moved to exactly the point where your strategy stops working. You effectively split that pie with a thousand people.
- debo_ 6mo agoBecause they are doing it for fun?
- sterlingcrispin 6mo agofor the lulz obviously you wouldn't get it
- unclad5968 6mo agoAll strategies get priced in eventually. This is basically the thesis of index funds. It's fine to make money in the interim, but that isn't everyone's goal.
- boothby 6mo agoWell, it's not making money, for one.
- qbane 6mo agonull hypothesis bot
- mickhayes 6mo ago[dead]
- fooker 6mo agoDon’t be gullible enough to fall for this bad math. Say 70% of the time it resolves to ‘no’, you still don’t make money by blindly choosing ‘no’. Guess why? Hint: This strategy is also described with the macabre analogy: picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. Do you want to pick up pennies in front of a steamroller?
- lokar 6mo agoFall for it? I think it's pretty clear the author is not trying to convince any one of anything. It's mostly a joke.
- fer 6mo agoWhether it's pennies in front of a steamroller will depend on the entry price, EV, time left to resolution and many other variables. Though I agree it's bad math, even if 70% resolve to no, there's a high variance among all of them, and to know whether it's a good bet or not... you have to do your DD on that particular market. Even if you follow the Kelly criterion, randomly choosing bets will probably tank your bankroll sooner or later.
- fooker 6mo ago> Whether it's pennies in front of a steamroller will depend on […] many other variables. No, all these variables cancel out. If you were picking and choosing, yes. But this approach is basically betting no on all the markets. The textbook explanation of this is the central limit theorem, proving this mathematically is a bit more involved for power-law systems like this but it’s empirically valid.
- Majromax 6mo ago> picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. This or any other statistical play is only 'in front of a steamroller' if you do it with leverage, especially if notionally uncorollated bets suddenly move together. Bets on Polymarket have limited downside by design, and bets in different categories are obviously unrelated to each other. Without having looked into this in detail, however, I suspect the problem would be limited capacity; markets that are both deep and so trivially irrational are probably fairly infrequent. You might pick up pennies but only pennies.
- slg 6mo agoIt's interesting that this is explicitly for non-sports markets because I see no reason why this would be less applicable there. Sports betters have long talked about that the winning strategy is usually to bet the under (i.e. the no) on most bets. The over (i.e. the yes) is generally a more exciting and fun outcome which causes it to attract more betters which in turns makes that side overpriced. Like with this bot, I have no idea if that will still lead to actual positive returns. This might just be a remnant from a time when these betting lines were set less intelligently. But all things being equal, it seems logical that "boring" bets would have a better return in the long run than "exciting" bets as long as some betters are at least partially motivated by entertainment. There's probably a lot of knowledge like this that sports betters have built up over decades that could apply to these new forms of non-sports gambling.
- sterlingcrispin 6mo agoit avoids sports bets because "Who will win game 6 of XYZ" is formatted on the polymarket backend as a Yes/No bet. There's a lot of markets with Yes/No plumbing even though you wouldn't interpret them as such
- slg 6mo agoFair enough, I assumed the exclusion of sports with a deliberate decision rather than one forced on the project due to the technical details of the platform.
- dheera 6mo agoStrategies like this can easily be positive EV until enough people discover it and that actually is the driving force behind efficient pricing. Here's how the mechanism works: I find that something is statistically worth $0.70 but I am able to buy it for $0.60 and statistically sell it for $0.70 (in the average). I make $0.10 each trade on average. Until you come along, copy my strategy and change $0.60 to $0.61 to frontrun my trades. Then someone else does it for $0.62. Until the market finally reprices to $0.70 where it should be. The guy who tries $0.71 loses money and stops, and then it goes back to $0.70. It's a stable feedback loop. There are lots of positive EV strategies lying around in these inefficient markets that Citadel hasn't (yet) descended upon. The best advice I can give is if you find one, trade the hell out of it and don't open source it or tell anyone about it, because as soon as more people run it, it will cease to be positive EV and then after that it becomes an infrastructure game. If it's popular on Github it probably doesn't work. If you found something that works and is paying your rent, don't put it on Github. My 2 cents.
- chrisgd 6mo agoVery cool. The opposite of the black swan or turkey corollary. Every day the turkey gets fed and is happy until Thanksgiving rolls around.
- modeless 6mo agoPolymarket already has "Nothing Ever Happens" markets where you can bet on a set of events all not happening together. Because why not.
- neko_ranger 6mo ago"Nothing ever happens" ETF
- modeless 6mo agoI think these would qualify https://etfdb.com/etfdb-category/inverse-volatility/ https://etfdb.com/etfdb-category/inverse-volatility/
- 1attice 6mo agoToo bad we can't run this bot in the nineties. There seems to be quite a bit happening these days. The stopped clock is right twice a day, but it reads noon and we're at half past three
- Retr0id 6mo agoSomeone has (had?) a bot on Manifold that does the same thing, and it is profitable: https://manifold.markets/dcxStep https://manifold.markets/dcxStep (Manifold doesn't use real money, so there's more "free money" lying around waiting to be picked up than on most real-money markets)
- declan_roberts 6mo agoI saw the Twitter meme and knew instantly he was going to be a good follow. Was not disappointed!
- withinrafael 6mo agoVery confusing. Polymarket doesn't allow US use/users. How are folks in the US participating on Polymarket? (VPNs and the like reportedly don't help either due to KYC policies.)
- Cider9986 6mo agoCryptocurrency. Even if it is a traceable crypto like usdt, it doesn't seem to be enforced.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- xboxnolifes 6mo agoIdk if there is new KYC I dont know about, but you just needed a VPN.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> Polymarket doesn't allow US use/users. How are folks in the US participating on Polymarket? Same way Binance did [1]. Assuming they wouldn’t get charged. [1] https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/362592428897 https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/362592428897
- infecto 6mo agoPolymarket has been live in the US since the beginning of the year. There is a queue but it’s absolutely live. And before that you could still use it so long as you did not use a VPN.
- withinrafael 6mo agoStrange. The current terms state: > Restricted Jurisdictions. You acknowledge and agree that you are not permitted to access, use or trade with the Contracts on the Platform if you are residing in, a citizen of, organized in or located in the following jurisdictions (collectively, the “Restricted Jurisdictions”): Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Ontario, Poland, Quebec, Russia, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, the United Kingdom, the United States; or a jurisdiction or territory that is the subject of comprehensive country-wide, territory-wide, or regional economic sanctions by the United States, including but not limited to Iran, Syria, Cuba, North Korea, and the Crimea, Dontesk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine. Maybe I'm supposed to ignore that?
- clayhacks 6mo agoSomeone needs to make a market on whether or not this is profitable
- zaik 6mo agoWhat happens when the bot places a huge bet on "No" in this market?
- krashidov 6mo agoIsn't this just picking up pennies on an active railroad track? You'll win small bets and then get run over once a long tail event completely wipes you out.
- _3u10 6mo agoIf you bet it all on one event yes, otherwise long tail just loses your bet. Downside risk is limited to your bet.
- achandra03 6mo agoI don't think the author is trying to pretend this is some sophisticated strategy you should actually use (note the chudjak in the image on github)
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- lxgr 6mo agoIf there's a consistent, sufficiently strong bias towards "yes" and you have enough capital, it doesn't matter as long as you size your bets right and you're able to survive a few train collisions.
- dnnddidiej 6mo agoBetteridge's Bet
- cold_tom 6mo ago[dead]
- unreal37 6mo agoSome things always happen too. You need to avoid certain terms.
- dsmurrell 6mo agoWhen you win you win small but when you lose you lose big? :)
- Toxygene 6mo agoThe idea was kind of amusing until I went to the GitHub page and was greeted with a Chudjak [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Crusius#In_popular_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Crusius#In_popular_cul...
- dakolli 6mo agoThere's usually more edge baked into the No side in all prediction markets, because a little too much money usually gets poured in to yes, for obvious reasons. Its been this way in sports markets for decades, there's no fun in betting no so lots of dumb money ends up on Yes.
- kwar13 6mo agoBetting "no" on an outcome, is bettering "yes" on ALL other possible outcomes. There is even an operation for it: https://docs.polymarket.com/advanced/neg-risk https://docs.polymarket.com/advanced/neg-risk
- pinkmuffinere 6mo agoAm I misunderstanding? I think that’s trivially not true. Consider: Joe Dart elected president Y/N Cory Wong elected president Y/N A no bet on Joe Dart is not a yes bet on Cory Wong.
- rgmerk 6mo agoDart/Wong for America ‘28 - Give America Back Its Groove.
- kwar13 6mo agoDid you read the link? A NO bet on Joe Dart is a YES bet on Cory Wong + Others. It is trivial. Saying NO to a candidate means you're saying YES to ALL other candidates with varying probabilities that would sum to the neg risk of that NO bet.
- pinkmuffinere 6mo agoAh I see, I missed the + Others part in my initial reading, i see it gives the same payout. The shared link just asserts the same thing you’ve asserted with additional technical language that I don’t understand, so reading it didn’t help me much. Perhaps this is pedantic, but this equivalence is ignoring fees, spread, and slippage, right?
- worldsavior 6mo agoThat's not true. The different outcomes don't have any relation to each other.
- kwar13 6mo ago
- daveswilson 6mo agoThe Jeraptha would find it boring. Just saying.
- 0xAgentKitchen 6mo ago[dead]
- enesz 6mo ago[dead]
- edge_trader_41 6mo ago[dead]
- ZeroGravitas 6mo agoHas anyone opened a "Will the Bot buy "no" on this?" market yet?
- mzelling 6mo agoThe fact that the strategy makes zero returns suggests that Polymarket is unbiased — this is moderately interesting. Has anybody looked into the repo in more detail? I imagine it's useful for infrastructure inspiration to build your own bot pursuing more differentiated trading strategies.