Comment by vcf
3 days ago
Thanks! No, we haven't looked at the capital "locked" in these markets (which is important considering there is no margin trading, at least not yet). Most markets have a short horizon, but some have very long ones. It gets very complicated very quickly because it's not always the case that you open a position and then close it (you get partial fills, users closing partial positions, etc.). Taking that into consideration would make liquidity providers look even better than they do in our study. Not having their capital locked allows liquidity providers to trade more and earn more per trade on average. Trading on margin would allow liquidity takers to lose more money more quickly (this is an educated guess; you never know what the outcome of a new policy would be until you implement it).
The long horizon ones are also interesting on Polymarket because the vast majority don't have APY. As a result, prices should be discounted, but sum-to-1 doesn't allow for it. I'd expect a negative skew to the performance of traders willing to take those inflated prices (relative to what the odds DCF imply they should be). But there's also no upside for makers, so liquidity is pretty thin.