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Comment by qoez | Hacker News Reader

As someone who makes their living doing PMs this is far from the reality. There's lots of markets that are beatable without a latency edge. Also anyone can apply to be co-located with their servers if you do KYC.

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I think it 100% depends on what markets you’re looking at.

If you’re betting/trading on sports (80% prediction market activity by volume, you are 100% up against Susquehanna. Doubly so if you’re predicting combos because there is not nearly enough liquidity.

There are multiple parties involved when you place a trade on a prediction market and all of them get paid.

I’m not stating that there’s no market a relatively unsophisticated investor can take advantage of just pushing back on the idea that PMs are PvP

I mostly agree. Sports are mostly very well priced (live sports not so much). Many new markets that are just invented by polymarket/kalshi though SIG are basically on an even playing field with you in terms of coming up with a way to price it (and if it's a niche low liquidity market they probably don't pay much attention to it anyway so you can easily come in and price it with a large edge). Personally lots of my money is probably coming from SIG itself in fact given that I mostly take liquidity that are placed at poor prices where I've spent many weeks on trying to figure a more informed way to price it.

I'm just assuming here, but I'm sure they have cameras or some other type of data in the stadium, and vision models running on those to make instant trades when a home run has been hit, touchdown scores, etc. and have a huge edge on retail money.

At least on the two big sports gambling sites, they lock the app from making bets during these moments so you can't. I can verify this because I like to go to sports games and had that idea. "Oh I'm here live I wonder if this will work?" Doesn't work.

Can't speak to prediction markets, haven't touched 'em.

Yeah I have heard about gambling sites doing this, but for prediction markets I dont think they can do that. But also how can they lock it before a home run happens unless they're just locking it on every at-bat and rejecting/holding bets if a HR happens? These prediction markets have APIs and work the same way as the stock market, there are sellers and buyers in the market so messing with that process would be explicitly unfair and probably illegal.

Yes they lock it before the snap, or before the pitch is thrown. All I can figure is that they have someone at every game, or somehow have a "live-er" live feed than genpop.

While this is true, retail click traders are still not remotely on the same playing field in any regard as an electronic trading desk who takes the market seriously.

That's obviously true, but at least retail are totally allowed to place maker orders and act as the 'sportsbook' themselves. Taker orders are usually (but far from always) -ev but again at least there's the option to be a maker. Many of the best opportunities is to take liquidty from HFT firms with poor prices as well (there's too many markets for them to price it all correctly and you have an advantage by being allowed infinite time to think about how to price a given market).

Do you know what KYC stands for?

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfY-3Dl3yxq8HKFjFad...

> anyone

> use of the Polymarket site (the “Polymarket Site”) for trading activities, by persons or entities who are U.S. persons (“U.S. Persons”), as defined in the enclosed Appendix, is strictly prohibited, with no exceptions

Because Polymarket US is a separate, regulated entity.

Thanks, I misunderstood that and thought you meant colocating next to their server by figuring out where their infra is. Didn't know it's an official feature of theirs.

PMs?

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