Wolf🦇🔊

I'm getting annoyed by all this stupid Polymarket FUD from the media. The front page story of the WSJ right now is a story unmasking the "Polymarket whale." Obviously, the story is a nothingburger—the whale is a French punter who thinks the pollsters aren't correcting for shy Trump voters. Turns out he was gradually edging into his position because he didn't want to push up his own entrance price. No manipulation, no Trump campaign conspiracy. So, fine. I guess this wasn't the smoking gun for Polymarket. Maybe you can still trust the platform. But I'm not satisfied with this. What if he was a manipulator? Say that he was crazy and running up Trump shares because of his loyalty to Trump. Then what? The answer: then nothing. The market adjusts back to the true price because it's a market. What happens when some crazy person buys a bunch of Tesla shares because he loves Elon Musk? The answer is that guy gets bad execution, and then the market goes back to the true price because that's how markets work. You cannot corner the $2B+ market for Trump shares with $30M. Every market will have whales. There was recently a so-called "NASDAQ whale" (turned out to be Softbank), but that does not mean the NASDAQ prices do not reflect reality. The moment after the whale sweeps the book, prices are elevated. But then buyers and sellers equilibrate and find the true price. If you don't believe this, then you don't believe in markets. Now there's a writeup about wash trading on Polymarket (probably crypto people speculating on a token airdrop). They claim as much as 30% of Polymarket volumes might be wash trading! Therefore you can't trust Polymarket odds. Nope, also wrong. Wash trading does not affect prices, it affects volumes. Maybe you discount volumes 30% if you believe this—even then, Polymarket is 15x the size of the next largest election betting market. 15 times. In other words, wash trading or not, Polymarket is the market. Any other market is a rounding error. This is also why it infuriated me to see this on the Bloomberg front page today: I'm sure an editor somewhere made a concession to do this to seem non-partisan. But this is a chart crime. Polymarket has about 15x the volume of Kalshi, and about 70x the volume of PredictIt. These should not be side-by-side on the same chart. This is like comparing the price of soybeans on the CME to the price at a local farmer's market. What's with all this hysteria about Polymarket? There are massive hedge funds trading on Polymarket. JP Morgan is using Polymarket odds to price equities whose performance rides on the election. Serious players that respect markets are looking at Polymarket and drawing the rational inference: ah, here is what markets think is going to happen. It's no different than markets forecasting interest rates or inflation. But election betting markets have exploded this election, largely driven by a single product: Polymarket. Which is why all this suspicious coverage is getting on my nerves. Individually each of these stories are fine, and I'm sure the reporters are being earnest. But there's a deep suspicion of markets that seeps through all of these pieces. It's like they believe obviously markets can't be trusted unless proven otherwise. But Polymarket represents a rejection of the mainstream media, its sensationalism, its expert-ism. It says—shut up about your alarmist ephemeral slop. If it didn't move the odds, then I don't believe it actually mattered to the outcome. And the MSM doesn't like this, because they're in the business of convincing you that you need to keep reading all the clickbait they put out. So here we are. Be very afraid—Polymarket was invested in by Peter Thiel (like thousands of other startups)! It has whales (like every market does)! It has wash trading (which affect volumes, not prices)! I'll end on this. I was reading an old paper detailing the history of election betting markets. As it happens, election betting was ubiquitous in American history, from the 1800s all the way up until 1940. The New York Times—yes, that New York Times—used to list daily election price quotes. There's a great tidbit from 1924 where the New York Times praises the manipulation-resistant of election betting markets: Couldn't have said it better myself.