This is a decent guide, but some points are wrong - for instance you can convert to USDC on regular coinbase just fine with no fees.
I successfully made around 90k on the various Trump and Biden markets on Polymarket and have been meaning to write up something about it. The free money is mostly gone, and I haven't bothered to get the 4% returns over two months because I can get better returns for the same level of risk in DeFi (which I also want to write an article about. 20% close to risk free returns, or 40% slightly risky returns are both very high.)
I'm currently interested in the 100M vaccine market, please PM me if you want to spend some time modelling it with me. I spent a lot of time last week collecting relevant data and I have a pretty substantial position currently.
20% over two months sounds extremely high to be close to risk free. I'd be very curious to hear more.
I wrote a little at the bottom of my post. IMO probably the main "catch" is that a lot of what you're getting paid is in governance tokens that may not hold their value, and it's expensive in gas to be constantly claiming and selling them as you receive them.
Harvest automatically does this, so your only exposure is to farm, which seems likely to hold its value as long as money is locked up there.
And over 30% annually on FTX.com (or FTX.US for US residents) currently.
https://ftx.com/spot-margin/lending
I used gemini to purchase GUSD and used curve to convert to USDC, and also bought a bunch of USDC on coinbase directly.
Are you sure you can do it with no fees? I know you can do it if you deposit USD but I don't think it's possible with other currencies.
Yes, you need to deposit USD. If you don't have USD, you should convert using a non-crypto service, and you'll probably get lower costs, although I don't have experience with that.
I recently pulled my money out of Polymarket. Returns don't seem that great anymore. The binary options seemed at least reasonably priced to me when I did some Black Scholes. The maga money is basically gone.
People should also be warned that it is expensive to get out of Polymarket.
That's a good point. I'm used to the free withdrawals. Didn't realize the costs until I looked at their blog just now.
Will update the article.
At the date of writing there is an active prediction market asking if Trump will be president of the USA on the 31st of March, 2021. The odds are 0.98/0.02.
If I understand right both Polymarket and Omen have 2% trading fees. I would expect that at two percent trading fees there's not any profit to be made on 0.98/0.02 odds.
I don't know about Omen, but on Polymarket you can mostly avoid this issue by minting a complete set of shares and selling the cheaper side. In your example this would only cost you $0.0004 in fees to acquire shares at $0.98. The easiest way I know of to mint complete shares is to add and then immediately remove liquidity
What are the limits of this technique to avoid fees of polymarket? Why doesn't everyone do it and pay no fees?
The fees are always 2% of the transaction value; i.e. numShares*avgPrice. The trick I described lets you substitute (1-avgPrice) when that would be cheaper . I should've been much clearer about this initially; I forgot that most people here probably don't know the polymarket fee structure.
That's a good point. I'lll update the post to mention it. There is another trump market offering 5% (so 3% after the fees) but it's far smaller. https://polymarket.com/market/will-donald-trump-be-president-of-the-usa-on-may-31-2021
The payoff per trade is in the region of 4% with a roughly 30 - 60 day turnaround time. Because of various costs, it's probably not economical to trade on less than 2k USD as the fixed costs will eat up your margin.
To what degree do you think this is just the "fair price of risk" for doing things on crypto platforms? The returns I've seen are roughly inline with various other DeFi opportunities or the contango of the BTC futures curve.
Whilst I think that prediction markets have had some issues this year, I think a large part of that was less about "crypto" and more about "broken prediction markets". (In fact, the "price of risk" in the spread between (say) Augur / Polymarket and Betfair for the same contract still existed in this period).
So I don't really think it's the price of risk. I think it's just the markets being shallow and inefficient and most casual players being uninterested in a 4% return and unable to exploit one even if they were interested as their transaction fees would erase that margin.
I'm a laymen in crypto terms seeking to join Polymarket.
Does all her still pertain regarding joinging & moving $ ? Or have I missed the boat & some where else has the best predictions. My focus is on betting against political & covid emotionalism using understanding of human psychologiy & intuitive & scientific knowledge of the covid vaccines & political culture.
Thanks
I believe that exploiting inefficiencies in crypto prediction markets is an easy way to make market beating returns. This guide is a step by step walkthrough of how to make bets on these markets. I think this is useful because the process is somewhat complicated and there are a few non-obvious mistakes which can wipe out your returns.
The payoff per trade is in the region of 3% with a roughly 30 - 60 day turnaround time. Because of various costs, it's probably not economical to trade on less than 5k USD as the fixed costs will eat up your margin.
This is not financial advice. I may be wrong. The steps may be wrong. The specifics will become outdated over time. This is not zero-risk.
Prediction markets are markets where people predict things, then the thing happens and then people either make or loose money based on whether their predictions were correct. The "market" in prediction market comes from the fact that rather than having a single agent set the odds and offer people bets, as is the case with a bookie, instead there is a supply of options representing outcomes which people bid on and freely exchange. The tokens are distributed in an initial auction. People can trade their tokens between the auction and the market resolving. Once the market resolves, those options can be redeemed for a fixed amount if they represent the correct outcome. Tokens representing the incorrect outcome are worthless.
There are various kinds of markets and formats but the simplest is a binary yes no question which resolves on a specific date. A few examples are:
The tokens for these markets typically resolve for 1$ if they're correct or 0$ if incorrect, meaning the token price is bounded between 0$ - 1$ and converts neatly to a percentage.
On the object level because these markets are often obviously insane. At the date of writing there is an active prediction market asking if Trump will be president of the USA on the 31st of May, 2021. The odds are 0.95/0.05. Vitaliks post describing how he made money from the US election is another good example. On a more meta level, because prediction markets are far less optimized than other financial markets. Prediction markets today are small, shallow and inaccessible. Because of this they are not subject to the strong optimizing forces that work on larger markets such as those for stocks/bonds. Most of the money in prediction markets comes amateurs making bets with their personal money, not professionals and financial institutions whose existence depends on being better than you at making those bets.
Intuition and common sense combined with basic research. To me it's been fairly obvious when certain markets were deeply wrong. A few markets I think are insane at the moment:
While there is no structured method to identifying insane markets there are a few things that are good to keep in mind:
I realize that not giving a clear way to identify exploitable markets weakens the case for this. Still, I think it's better to be upfront. There's no magic formula, just intuition and reason. Even then there's always the meta-uncertainty over your level of confidence in your predictions. If that's too much of a risk for you, or if you think you're not sufficiently well-calibrated, then you probably shouldn't do this.
There are four basic things you need to do:
This guide assumes you're going to be using polymarket. Polymarket is one of the largest and most reliable on-chain markets at the moment. Different markets may require different deposit methods or tokens to participate in so this guide won't apply.
The first step is to acquire crypto. Polymarket accepts USD coin (USDC), a stable coin pegged to the US dollar. You'll need to acquire X USDC, where X is the amount in USD that you want to bet. You'll also need around 0.03 Ether (ETH) for transaction fees. The main risk in this step is incurring transaction costs. High costs usually arise from one of two mistakes:
Follow these steps to avoid that risk:
Done correctly, your total fee should be around 0.2 - 0.4% or less. There are volume incentives so going over around 50k will reduce your fees somewhat.
The second step is to get your crypto into polymarket. There are two risks here: fees and loosing your crypto due to human error. We minimize fees by using metamask. Metamask is a crypto wallet. Its unique feature is that it allows you to give other apps permission to do things with your money. By doing a "metamask deposit" into polymarket, you avoid the fees incurred with a standard deposit where you transfer money from your exchange wallet to polymarket's wallet. We minimize the risk of human error by saving backup access codes and testing that those codes work.
Do the following
Once the market ends you'll be able to redeem any options you have. Redeem your options by clinking the button and withdraw them to metamask or a crypto exchange wallet. You'll need ETH to do this but the total cost should be less than $40 USD or so. Alternately, wait a while for polymarket's no withdrawal options to go live as they'll have far lower fees.
Following the steps above will minimize your fees. That being said, there are still a few risks to consider. These are:
Crossposted to my blog