Comment by well_ackshually
9 hours ago
There's three kinds of players on Polymarket & others
* The insider trading ones that will never lose money
* The wallstreetbets degenerates with enough money that it's a fun game even if you lose money
* People that have seen every chance they have at becoming moderately wealthy disappear under the current economic state of their country, where overwhelming debt is likely. The era of making it wealthy from a job is gone, an enormous part of the population is stuck going from small job to ubering, while being showered with videos of wealth from social media. The only way to make it out is gambling. Whether that's polymarket, sports betting, etc.
When you're already in a shit situation with no hope, "it's a zero sum game" isn't a good counterargument.
There are also large trading/market making firms providing liquidity, especially on markets associated with up/down bets on crypto, stocks etc. They use all the options trading machinery they've already built for more 'respectable' venues like CME/Eurex etc, further squeezing the margins for retail traders.
They're active on bets that are even considered "meme" bets. Example: Jesus returning in 2026 - If you can get a loan at 4% as a big well respected trading firm and plonk it on Jesus not returning at 94 cents, you're making ca. 2% for 'free'. (Unless Jesus returns, in which case you have bigger problems than your portfolio pnl).
Note that #1 will get kicked off the platform immediately. Even non-inside traders who win significantly more than expected will be kicked off. If you’re on the platform, you’re losing.
This is true for traditional gambling platforms, because they bet directly against their users, and make money when their users lose those bets.
Polymarket has a different incentive. They profit when their users bet more money, through percentage fees. Insider trading helps them achieve this by bringing in more money to the platform--they won't kick insider traders off.
At the moment being, Polymarket has an enormous reputational incentive against behaving like a predatory gambling company. People rely on it as a kind of decentralized alternative to New York Times. Distorting this effect would be very short-sighted.
I believe they are incentivized to discourage insider bets and essentially "rigged" wins. I do not think they will ever be able to control the problem of insiders leveraging guaranteed knowledge to take money for the poor suckers who don't know the game they are playing. Maybe that's too pessimistic, but at this point I don't see how anything but a pessimistic view is warranted.
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And online sports books have the same reputational incentives, but don't seem to be suffering any damage.
That was my initial opinion, but more recently it's been established that there's quite a bit of a cat and mouse game here – people have come up with elaborate workarounds to avoid getting booted or limited by the platform, while the platforms come up with increasingly sophisticated monitoring to catch them before they win too much.
Though to your point I think these big winners are not representative of most users, who in my experience often think they're beating the system but in reality just don't log their losses very well. The house always wins etc etc.
Do these platforms care since the insider traders aren’t taking money from the house?
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