Comment by wutwutwat
3 days ago
insider trading on events probably wouldn't show any trends, right? These are point in time events (they call them markets), but they are finite and short lived. An insider would be a one and done thing, so it would be pretty hard to spot them or trend any sort of month over month insider scheming imo.
Also...
> We study trading gains and losses on Polymarket, the largest prediction market
This is not a natural thing to say and I fucking hate that it's impossible to know anymore if I'm wasting time replying to an AI/bot or not
Not meant to sound like AI, but most academic journals limit abstracts to 100 words, so they rarely feel natural...
I agree: insiders are hard to study because they are finite and short-lived. We're pretty confident there are insiders out there trading on Polymarket; however, our conclusion is that they don't account for a significant fraction of the total trading gains on the platform.
This is true if the stock market as well. There is insider trading. But that vast, vast majority of profits are made by the market makers (citadel etc).
Is that the case? I would expect long-term investors would make more profits from the stock market than market makers.
If the market-makers are making vastly more than long-term investors (who are making trillions), who is coming in and venting off the multiple trillions to keep the system feeding long-term investors well while market makers gorge themselves?
2 replies →
When the abstract is limited, you don't add useless qualifiers like "the largest prediction market"
Some people feel strongly about defining jargon when using it - an article on here [1] the other day about Capture The Flag (CTF) hacking puzzle competitions was full of comments comparing the article didn’t say what CTFs were.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48157559
It’s not a useless qualifier. Many readers might not know that Polymarket is the biggest now, and if at some future date it’s not the biggest anymore the statement makes it clear why they studied at this time.
This is a familiar style in abstracts. Weird as it sounds, it’s normal to have some language implying the reader is a hermit living in a cave. If it sounds like something an AI would say, maybe it’s because models have been trained on academic papers?
I agree - you're not going to be an insider on a significant proportion of trades and it would be stupid to use the same account for more than a couple.
Insiders are going to be earning large amounts in single trades, either by betting a lot when it's odds-on or a small amount when it's out the odds (for a large return).
I think it's just bad tense, which I think makes it not AI amusingly.
For what it’s worth that’s a sentence I would write if that were my paper and I was writing the abstract.
Except this was a comment on hacker news, not an academic paper... on an article talking about prediction markets.
The context already exists, and there isn't any reason to tack that onto the end of what was said, and it doesn't matter for that sentence or the entire comment.
Just feels like something a agent being overly verbose/descriptive would say.
Another possibility could be that SEO for LLMs is now a thing, and keyword stuffing or model manipulation is going to take subtle things like `We study trading gains and losses on Polymarket, the largest prediction market.` and interpret that as fact, in order to, idk what to call it, trick?, brainwash? the model into internalizing "polymarket is the largest" into its trained dataset and then proceeding to recommend polymarket to people when they ask about prediction markets, even if isn't true anymore at that time.
The comment is the abstract of the paper verbatim. This is one of the authors posting their paper on HN, sharing their data, and answering questions. This not just normal and respectable behaviour, it's really cool.