7 ms·

I don't understand who is taking the other side of all these insane Polymarket bets. Is Polymarket doing it?

by guyzero 5mo ago

8note 5mo ago
gambling addicts is the answer
Groxx 5mo ago
There's quite a lot of ways to interpret this question... but for that day's daily bet: >A temperature of 18C was seen as a 99.6pc probability before the temperature spiked later in the day. 99.6% of them didn't take the insane bet. And at least one of those 0.4% (by value? count? idk) decided to cheat.
- jjice 5mo ago
  > 99.6% of them didn't take the insane bet. I don't think the actual bet was insane, but the concept of betting on the weather is insane.
  - Groxx 5mo ago
    People bet on anything and everything, and the less controllable the better, afaict. "I'll bet you $5 that snail will eat the cucumber before the broccoli" - > "fuck yes, make it $20" is 100% a thing I could see happening. Weather is significantly easier to do every day though, unless you know a snail farmer with a twitch stream (if so, hook me up!).
  - marton78 5mo ago
    There are legitimate reasons to bet on the weather. If you're a farmer, betting on drought can be a hedge against a bad year.
bloppe 5mo ago
If polymarket were staking wagers on its own platform, then it would have to worry about the integrity of the contracts, which is a nonstarter
- mcmcmc 5mo ago
  Why do you think it’s a nonstarter when so many of these new platforms do commit fraud all the time and get away with it? It’s only a problem if they get caught, and then only if people actually pay attention enough to care
- tantalor 5mo ago
  You're wrong. The big prediction markets (Polymarket, Kalshi) employ in-house market makers and contractors. They provide liquidity for less-active contracts. They generally are not profitable.
thimabi 5mo ago
I don’t understand why these bets are allowed at all. Can one just make an account there and bet in anything? The whole “prediction market” charade is increasingly proving to lend itself to abuse. I hope regulations catch up with it soon, otherwise more shenanigans will follow.
- Svoka 5mo ago
  As Ukrainian I find bets if some city would be captured - peak degeneracy. People are being sent to die or protecting their homes should not be someone bet.
- logicchains 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - VectorLock 5mo ago
    Certain no negative externalities from these shenanigans here, let people do what they want to do regardless of how it harms others.
    - logicchains 5mo ago
      [flagged]
      - hrimfaxi 5mo ago
        Why do airports collect weather data at all? Just for fun?
  - hrimfaxi 5mo ago
    Should it be legal to be able to bet when someone will die?
    - logicchains 5mo ago
      It's already legal for two individuals to bet when someone will die. It's illegal to murder someone; we don't need extra laws to stop that.
WarmWash 5mo ago
Casinos are purpose built to make you lose. People still show up compulsively everyday.
- gowld 5mo ago
  Casinos have many games with exact payout odds posted. Polymarket does not.
  - AndroTux 5mo ago
    So? There’s no game with payout odds in your favor. Lotto (at least where I live) also shows the odds, which are always ridiculously low. Still, people play, because the human brain isn’t built to understand odds. It’s essentially worthless as a metric.
- GBeastMode 5mo ago
  It’s not really a bug - it’s a feature. Casino software is designed from the ground up to keep players engaged for as long as possible, which is where all those retention and engagement mechanics come from. It’s also important to understand that the “house edge” isn’t about luck - it’s pure math built into the algorithms (RTP, volatility, etc.). At the same time, a lot depends on the operator. Different providers offer different levels of flexibility, and the casino owner ultimately decides what kind of conditions to offer players. Here’s a solid breakdown on why platform flexibility matters and how it’s used in practice: https://thetradable.com/press-releases/why-flexibility-and-scalability-of-turnkey-solution-providers-define-success-in-2025 https://thetradable.com/press-releases/why-flexibility-and-s...
hx8 5mo ago
It sounds like the other side of the bet was the actual winning bet when compared to Truth. Maybe they have great climate models and actually make a bet that they have an edge on. Maybe they have a gambling problem. Either way, they are the victims here.
- bloppe 5mo ago
  They are the victims of Goodhart's law. The contract unambiguously said it would be decided by the reading of that particular thermometer.
seanalltogether 5mo ago
People with cryptocurrency and no idea what to do with it.
christkv 5mo ago
Nope the only money on the line is the people betting. Polymarket gets their cut and has "no monetary risk"
- dymk 5mo ago
  Kalshi places bets in their own marketplace - but they have all the data and lots of analysts, so the house still wins on average.
somenameforme 5mo ago
There are communities larger than you'd expect around just about every topic imaginable. I'm certain there are temperature enthusiast groups, especially given its adjacency to climate stuff. It's probably going to be people mostly betting on something they have better than average knowledge of. I'd be interesting to compare the 'normal' majority temperature predictions from polymarket to local weather station predictions. I'm betting polymarket wins, by a wide margin. For instance chess wagers on polymarket are super interesting because it's far more informative than a chess engine, even though engines are much stronger than any human. The nuance is that engines don't appreciate human factors like how easy/hard a position is to play. And so an engine might just say 'dead draw', whereas a strong human can say 'nah, white has very good winning chances here' - and the polymarket wagers end up reflecting that. And so there it's mostly strong players making money from people who think turning on their engine and betting based on what it says is something nobody else must have thought of.
skipants 5mo ago
People that haven't read Black Swan and bet on every "sure bet" they can see
qurren 5mo ago
I've been quite successful trading weather prediction markets. The prediction markets were never about predicting outcomes. If that's the level you are playing on, you're playing at the lowest possible level, and probably won't win. The markets are now about properly modelling other peoples' manipulation of prediction. That's how Wall Street works as well. Companies can beat earnings and their stocks crash immediately after. It makes zero sense if you just model companies. It makes full sense if you stochastically model how an ensemble of humans behave under incentives and human-written bots behave under human-written policies. "Hairdryer sometimes get pointed at the weather sensor" and "Government sometimes fudges jobs/CPI data" are more or less the same thing. Build it into your model. That's the level you need to play on to profit in these markets. It's not that different from how a chess engine works.
- globular-toast 5mo ago
  I'm getting Foundation vibes from this comment. Asimov wrote that in 50s. Which is to say, this is by no means a new idea.
- Coneylake 5mo ago
  I am getting into trading on my own (my main job was in machine learning and I studied math in university). I've also come to a similar conclusion that you pretty much have to model these "manipulations" on top of the statistics/Brownian-motion-driven behavior of any security. I am currently working on a hybrid model for something on Polymarket but it's not yet sophisticated. Do you have any resources that you can point me to that expand on this very idea of adding human behavior to financial modeling?
  - qurren 5mo ago
    Without giving away my exact strategies, I'm also an ML engineer and I'll just say that ML is in 90% of cases the wrong tool, whereas simple regressions and scatter plots will unearth loads of statistical anomalies if you know where to look. You want to find anomalous behavior then hone in on how to make them your counterparty. ML can help you optimize things after that, but locating diamonds in a soup of noise is not really where ML shines.

I don't understand who is taking the other side of all these insane Polymarket bets. Is Polymarket doing it?

by guyzero 5mo ago

I don't understand who is taking the other side of all these insane Polymarket bets. Is Polymarket doing it?

8note 5mo ago

gambling addicts is the answer

Groxx 5mo ago

There's quite a lot of ways to interpret this question... but for that day's daily bet: >A temperature of 18C was seen as a 99.6pc probability before the temperature spiked later in the day. 99.6% of them didn't take the insane bet. And at least one of those 0.4% (by value? count? idk) decided to cheat.

jjice 5mo ago
> 99.6% of them didn't take the insane bet. I don't think the actual bet was insane, but the concept of betting on the weather is insane.
- Groxx 5mo ago
  People bet on anything and everything, and the less controllable the better, afaict. "I'll bet you $5 that snail will eat the cucumber before the broccoli" - > "fuck yes, make it $20" is 100% a thing I could see happening. Weather is significantly easier to do every day though, unless you know a snail farmer with a twitch stream (if so, hook me up!).
- marton78 5mo ago
  There are legitimate reasons to bet on the weather. If you're a farmer, betting on drought can be a hedge against a bad year.

bloppe 5mo ago

If polymarket were staking wagers on its own platform, then it would have to worry about the integrity of the contracts, which is a nonstarter

mcmcmc 5mo ago
Why do you think it’s a nonstarter when so many of these new platforms do commit fraud all the time and get away with it? It’s only a problem if they get caught, and then only if people actually pay attention enough to care
tantalor 5mo ago
You're wrong. The big prediction markets (Polymarket, Kalshi) employ in-house market makers and contractors. They provide liquidity for less-active contracts. They generally are not profitable.

thimabi 5mo ago

I don’t understand why these bets are allowed at all. Can one just make an account there and bet in anything? The whole “prediction market” charade is increasingly proving to lend itself to abuse. I hope regulations catch up with it soon, otherwise more shenanigans will follow.

Svoka 5mo ago
As Ukrainian I find bets if some city would be captured - peak degeneracy. People are being sent to die or protecting their homes should not be someone bet.
logicchains 5mo ago
[flagged]
- VectorLock 5mo ago
  Certain no negative externalities from these shenanigans here, let people do what they want to do regardless of how it harms others.
  - logicchains 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    - hrimfaxi 5mo ago
      Why do airports collect weather data at all? Just for fun?
- hrimfaxi 5mo ago
  Should it be legal to be able to bet when someone will die?
  - logicchains 5mo ago
    It's already legal for two individuals to bet when someone will die. It's illegal to murder someone; we don't need extra laws to stop that.

WarmWash 5mo ago

Casinos are purpose built to make you lose. People still show up compulsively everyday.

gowld 5mo ago
Casinos have many games with exact payout odds posted. Polymarket does not.
- AndroTux 5mo ago
  So? There’s no game with payout odds in your favor. Lotto (at least where I live) also shows the odds, which are always ridiculously low. Still, people play, because the human brain isn’t built to understand odds. It’s essentially worthless as a metric.
GBeastMode 5mo ago
It’s not really a bug - it’s a feature. Casino software is designed from the ground up to keep players engaged for as long as possible, which is where all those retention and engagement mechanics come from. It’s also important to understand that the “house edge” isn’t about luck - it’s pure math built into the algorithms (RTP, volatility, etc.). At the same time, a lot depends on the operator. Different providers offer different levels of flexibility, and the casino owner ultimately decides what kind of conditions to offer players. Here’s a solid breakdown on why platform flexibility matters and how it’s used in practice: https://thetradable.com/press-releases/why-flexibility-and-scalability-of-turnkey-solution-providers-define-success-in-2025 https://thetradable.com/press-releases/why-flexibility-and-s...

hx8 5mo ago

It sounds like the other side of the bet was the actual winning bet when compared to Truth. Maybe they have great climate models and actually make a bet that they have an edge on. Maybe they have a gambling problem. Either way, they are the victims here.

bloppe 5mo ago
They are the victims of Goodhart's law. The contract unambiguously said it would be decided by the reading of that particular thermometer.

seanalltogether 5mo ago

People with cryptocurrency and no idea what to do with it.

christkv 5mo ago

Nope the only money on the line is the people betting. Polymarket gets their cut and has "no monetary risk"

dymk 5mo ago
Kalshi places bets in their own marketplace - but they have all the data and lots of analysts, so the house still wins on average.

somenameforme 5mo ago

There are communities larger than you'd expect around just about every topic imaginable. I'm certain there are temperature enthusiast groups, especially given its adjacency to climate stuff. It's probably going to be people mostly betting on something they have better than average knowledge of. I'd be interesting to compare the 'normal' majority temperature predictions from polymarket to local weather station predictions. I'm betting polymarket wins, by a wide margin. For instance chess wagers on polymarket are super interesting because it's far more informative than a chess engine, even though engines are much stronger than any human. The nuance is that engines don't appreciate human factors like how easy/hard a position is to play. And so an engine might just say 'dead draw', whereas a strong human can say 'nah, white has very good winning chances here' - and the polymarket wagers end up reflecting that. And so there it's mostly strong players making money from people who think turning on their engine and betting based on what it says is something nobody else must have thought of.

skipants 5mo ago

People that haven't read Black Swan and bet on every "sure bet" they can see

qurren 5mo ago

I've been quite successful trading weather prediction markets. The prediction markets were never about predicting outcomes. If that's the level you are playing on, you're playing at the lowest possible level, and probably won't win. The markets are now about properly modelling other peoples' manipulation of prediction. That's how Wall Street works as well. Companies can beat earnings and their stocks crash immediately after. It makes zero sense if you just model companies. It makes full sense if you stochastically model how an ensemble of humans behave under incentives and human-written bots behave under human-written policies. "Hairdryer sometimes get pointed at the weather sensor" and "Government sometimes fudges jobs/CPI data" are more or less the same thing. Build it into your model. That's the level you need to play on to profit in these markets. It's not that different from how a chess engine works.

globular-toast 5mo ago
I'm getting Foundation vibes from this comment. Asimov wrote that in 50s. Which is to say, this is by no means a new idea.
Coneylake 5mo ago
I am getting into trading on my own (my main job was in machine learning and I studied math in university). I've also come to a similar conclusion that you pretty much have to model these "manipulations" on top of the statistics/Brownian-motion-driven behavior of any security. I am currently working on a hybrid model for something on Polymarket but it's not yet sophisticated. Do you have any resources that you can point me to that expand on this very idea of adding human behavior to financial modeling?
- qurren 5mo ago
  Without giving away my exact strategies, I'm also an ML engineer and I'll just say that ML is in 90% of cases the wrong tool, whereas simple regressions and scatter plots will unearth loads of statistical anomalies if you know where to look. You want to find anomalous behavior then hone in on how to make them your counterparty. ML can help you optimize things after that, but locating diamonds in a soup of noise is not really where ML shines.