Comment by vcf
3 days ago
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?
It's simpler when looking at prediction markets because of bounded payoffs and the zero-sum nature, so these are pure trading gains.
In equity markets, you have both the trading and investment components to account for. Market makers like Citadel don't invest; they aim to exit positions as quickly as possible to minimize risk and capital requirements. Long-term investors commit capital to risky assets and are compensated with a risk premium (expected to be positive, but it can turn out to be negative). Usually, the "cost" of liquidity paid by long-term investors is tiny related to the overall expected returns. In prediction markets, you don't have that.
Yes to put the other comment into different words, vast maj the excess returns (alpha as opposed to beta ), or the “slack” in markets , however you want to think of it, are picked up by market makers.
Difference between prediction markets and stock markets is prediction markets on a flat road and stock market on an uphill road
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?