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SamTinnerholmtoday at 2:04 PM5 repliesview on HN

Nice paper, and thanks for releasing the dataset.

The "top-1% winners are patient limit-order liquidity providers, not insiders" finding is interesting, and I'd love to see it extended cross-venue.

I work on tooling that normalizes orderbooks across Polymarket, Kalshi, Limitless, and Smarkets. From that angle, a lot of what looks locally like skilled Polymarket market-making turns out to be cross-venue arbitrage that happens to land on Polymarket. The same underlying question routinely trades 3-8% apart across venues for hours at meaningful depth, and a fast multi-venue stack rests limits on the lagging book at the exact moments the leading book moves. Locally that's indistinguishable from disciplined liquidity provision; cross-venue it's closer to FX triangular arb on the consensus price.

If your timestamps are fine-grained enough, a clean follow-up: for the top 1% of Polymarket profit-takers, what fraction of fills land within N seconds of a same-question move on Kalshi or Limitless? If it's materially above baseline, some of "skill" resolves into "cross-venue infrastructure" — which is also a more durable edge than within-venue alpha, so it could partly explain the weak monthly persistence you observe (the cross-venue gap closes when too many players run the same stack).

This might also be consistent with your insider-trading conclusion rather than against it: an insider on a real-world event has every reason to hit the lowest-friction venue with aggressive market orders (Polymarket: permissionless wallets, no KYC, no withdrawal limits). That's a fundamentally different profile from the patient limit-posting strategy your top bucket runs, so the two populations cleanly separate in the data even if both are present.


Replies

vcftoday at 2:50 PM

We have a grad student working on matching markets across venues. Not a trivial task at scale, but we hope to look at that eventually.

locallosttoday at 3:03 PM

I don't think that's surprising because the alternative would be that some people are able to predict the future. Whatever strategy one might figure out that works is long term destined to fail, as other people start using them. The only real way to make money there is by providing liquidity since it's a zero sum game. For the stock market this is not true because it's not zero sum, it grows over time.

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empath75today at 2:22 PM

There's probably also some hedging going on across accounts that look like directional bets.

postflopclaritytoday at 2:44 PM

this comment was clearly written by AI. please don't do that.

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