Pod #58 The Polymarket Whale

What's going on? Welcome to Footguns. We're recording this on Tuesday, June 18th. It's just me, Wasabi. I'm joined today by someone I've been wanting to talk to for a while by the name of Domer, who is as far as I can tell, the biggest better or the biggest single account on polymarket, which if you don't know what polymarket is, is the largest crypto prediction market, or I think it's the largest prediction market with real money period, where you just deposit some USDC on polymarket, and then you can go shorter long any number of different events. Obviously, US elections, world elections are on presidential, will swine flu become a pandemic, basically any kind of market you can think of. So just to give an idea, your profile on polymarket, which is called revenge toward 19 before, looks like you're holding almost 1.4 million in open positions and have done almost 700K in profit on the account. And ever since I've been looking at the site, I've seen your name consistently at the top of the ranking. So I'm really looking forward to chatting and learning about how you approach these trades. Yeah, how's it going, man? So I've been trying to get you on for a while, and I sent you some stuff that I wanted to talk about, but I think we got to just throw that all out the window right now because there's an emerging Trump meme coin situation that I think we need to talk about first. So I guess last night, there was a tweet from pirate wire, which is like a crypto adjacent or Trump adjacent news letter saying that Baron is launching a Trump coin, giving the contract address. And right now the odds, there's a market on polymarket that goes by is the Trump coin real is DJT real. That's trading at 24% chance it is real. And that's that it would be verified by Friday. So a few days from now and the coin is now listed on the mexico mexc exchange. It was just listed this morning. It's trading up, but let's just go through it. Like what you're in this market looks like you're currently betting no. What's what's your current thought process on this market? I mean, first of all, this is like, this is a great prediction market. This is like exactly what predicts the market should do, which is take an issue that people are kind of debating. Is this true? Is this not true? They're trying to piece together, you know, all the clues trying to figure it out and price it. And so, you know, I've spent the past, I don't know, 16 hours ever since. I mean, I saw the tweet two minutes after he came out and my instant reaction was that it was a joke because you had Baron Trump, like, how old is he 17 or 18? I think he just graduated high school. He's launching some Solana shit coin. Like, I'm not sure that this is quite accurate. So my first instinct was just dismiss this as a total joke. And then you had Martin Screlie get involved like, oh, it's legit. It's legit. And then you had some Trump adjacent, like, influencers step in like, oh, it's legit. So this market that you just cited, I think it's traded between when it first launch, I think it was about five. Sents, like people are very skeptical of five cents equals to 5%. So it's a zero hundred scale. So five cents would be like, okay, this is not real, right? And over the course of the past, however long it's been up, you know, 12 hours, I think it's traded up to 95 cents at one point. So 95% chance. So it's been very, very back and forth in terms of like, some people are absolutely sure that this is real. And some people are absolutely positive that it's fake. Yeah. And so you can one thing about Paulie Mark is you can look and see everyone's position at any time. So it looks like you're holding a no position right now. Are you is that your absolute view right now? Are you using that as a hedge and going along the coin? And if it goes to zero, then then it hedges against this coin that could have a much bigger upside. Yeah, no hedging. And I'm not, you know, I'm not totally certain if I was totally certain, I'd probably dump like, you know, 200,000 bucks on this. But, you know, so I have around 25,000 investment into it right now. So I'm pretty certain that it's not true. But, you know, when it comes to Trump, like you can't be, you can't be too certain of anything. Because it's like oftentimes the most ridiculous thing possible is the next thing that Trump did. Because it's like, I don't know, six, nine months ago, maybe a year ago, when he was launching the NFTs, you know, my initial reaction was, no, he's not launching NFTs. And then it takes until you see the Trump tweet that it's like, okay, yeah, I'm launching NFTs for you to actually believe that this is a real thing. So your, is this something that is that basically the insight that you're trading on? Are you kind of trying to piece together following each little tidbit that comes out on Twitter? Like there's like the Martin Screlie thing. There's, you know, people who are looking at the top holders. I think at one point there was a whale that hold held just, you know, double digit percentage of the supply. I'm not sure if that's still true or not. But I think, I think the biggest evidence against it is that I think this contract was created like a couple months ago. And the initial funding was from a Chinese exchange called KuKoin. I think that's like kind of the biggest evidence against it that the derivation of this whole thing kind of is a little bit sketchy. It doesn't seem, you know, on the level. Yeah. So the other, the thing, okay, I agree with you on that. The one piece that led me to reconsider that was that I'm also a subscriber to pirate wires. They have a daily email. And so there was a theory that was saying that obviously like this could have been just a hack like this guy's Twitter could have been hacked and putting out just a pump and dumb coin. But in this email newsletter that I got this morning, there was absolutely zero mention of, you know, hey, our account was hacked or any any mention that all of the coin. So that leads me to believe that tend for me to put a higher a higher chance on it. So I don't know how, or how do you sort of like evaluate that piece of evidence? Yeah, I mean, that's what's weird about the whole thing is because, you know, it came from, I think his name is Mike Salana and he's tied to the Founders Fund. I mean, Founders Fund is legit, you know, and that's a very, it's also a very strange thing to report that Trump is launching a Salonacoin and that Baron is involved. You know, if you take out the joke element of it, you know, this is a very oblique thing to make up. So you kind of have to take it a little bit seriously. You can't be totally dismissive of it because the source is seems pretty decent. And the information is like hard to invent totally. So there could be, you know, some shades of truth to it. Maybe Trump was thinking about it. Maybe, you know, there was a miscommunication at some point. So it's kind of, it's, I'm definitely not certain either way that it's real or that it's not real. And that's going back to what I was saying earlier that this is like perfect for a market because you're trying to figure out as everyone else is trying to figure it out. Is this legit or not? Okay. All right. Let me just ask you one more question about this because the way I framed it as like the possible hedge where right now like say what is the coin out like 100 million or something like that, right? If it's, if it's a real Trump coin, this thing is going to pump to a billion plus, right? So that's like, you know, massive upside. And if, if on the polymarket, the most you can win is going from 25% to 100% right? So like, would it make sense for a lot of people to just buy the coin with the higher upside and then short the market as a way to sort of like hedge hedge the risk, you know, give them more time to dump the coin if it turns out to be fake or offset that loss a little bit. Given that with polymarket, the upside is capped and with the coin, it's uncapped. Like, do you think that could be like definitively changing the number in the prediction market? That's possible, although, you know, I kind of know what I'm doing. So I can look at the the various holders of these shares. And I see that a lot of new accounts hold yes. And then a lot of older accounts are very skeptical and they hold no. So I don't so I think what you're saying could be a smart strategy, but I don't think anyone is doing that. Plus a lot of people that are in this space aren't super interested in hedging, you know, they're more interested in getting leverage and doubling down and things like that. All right, cool. So why don't we just like back up a little bit and get into your your backstory. Obviously you're your a non so however much you feel comfortable with. Can you talk about a little bit of your trading background and how you got into polymarket is that I think from when you were chatting earlier, you said you're doing this 16 hours a day and basically like this is all you're doing now. So how did you get from where you were before to to doing this 16 hours a day. Yeah, so I've been doing this a while. So when I first graduated from college, I had like a normal job. And this was back when like online poker was first getting started. So like the late 2000s. And so I was playing online poker on the side and I was doing really well at that. And then I quit my job and I just did online poker and then I transitioned from being a poker player to prediction markets, which were first getting started. Right. So this was like Obama versus McCain type stuff. And then I've been doing prediction markets pretty much ever since there was a few year period where there weren't really any American prediction markets. And so I was doing stock trading, but other than that, you know, I've just pretty much doing trading of some kind since pretty quickly after college. Okay, so and is polymarket where you're trading on predominantly or is that just one of many places that you're trading? Yeah, Paulian Market is just, I mean, it's by far the biggest prediction market that's ever existed, it dwarfs anything that has ever existed. It's going to 20X. I was just writing a tweet. This site called Predictit in the US was very popular in 2016 and 2020. I mean, Polymarket is going to be 20 times larger than Predictit was in 2024. You're talking about 16 hours a day. Yeah, there's so many markets, there's so much volume. It just takes an enormous amount of time and plus I love doing it. I'm the biggest liquidity provider. Pretty much any market that you click on in the site, I probably have offers in it and I probably have at least a slight opinion on it. That's why I tend to do a ton of volume and I have to spend a lot of time doing it. Is that your main strategy? Would you say your main strategy is doing the LP and getting the rewards from that or is it just doing that with a slight directional bias on the markets? How much of your alpha is coming from the LP versus the takes on the markets themselves? Exactly. It's a little bit of both. I would say, in fact, I look at my profit percentages broken down and it's about 50/50. It's been about 50/50 for over a year now. Half of my profits are coming from rewards from providing a ton of liquidity and then half are coming from trading profits. What does that tell you about Polymarket? The other thing we can get into is the difference between Polymarket and some of these other markets. If you go to Vegas or Sportsbook where you can bet on some of these things, Polymarket has no trading fees right now. How big is that in terms of the amount of trades you can be profitable and the liquidity that's there? That's just huge because there's no friction to making a trade. There's no reason not to make a trade if you think something is a good value. If you go to a site that has fees and it's like, "Do I want to pay 10 bucks to maybe lose this bet?" On Polymarket, there are no fees at all. That's frictionless. In fact, there's anti-fees because you're getting paid for providing liquidity. If you put offers on the order book near the midpoint, you'll get paid for that. I don't know. Maybe this is a rephrasing of what I just asked you. How much would you say that? Does the fact that Polymarket is so liquid and deep mean there's just less of a directional edge to be had and that the markets are just really, really efficient? Would you say that there's still a lot of juice left to squeeze or how do you think about the range of different markets and what are more inefficiency? I would say the basic answer is that there's probably over a thousand markets on Polymarket right now. I would say the odds on all of them are probably roughly correct, plus or minus 10%, but I would guess all of them are probably wrong if you're like an expert. If you're an expert on so and so topic, who's going to win the state in New Mexico or whatever because you live in New Mexico and you know everyone and it's like, you can probably come on the site and be like, okay, the odds are a little bit wrong. That's not an expert in this field. May see the odds as roughly correct, but someone who's like an expert can probably come in and make some profits off of it. I would say that the markets are roughly correct, but not like there. If you know what you're doing and you can be selective about what you're betting on, you can probably easily make some profits. And do you have any areas like that where you feel particularly strong or do you just kind of like your thing is just looking at them all? I would say the one market that I'm very strong on and it's one of the biggest markets right now is who's Trump going to pick for his VP. I feel like I'm very, very, very experienced in VP betting, you know, because I'm a doing it since 2008. I was, so one of the stories that got me some attention was that I bet on Sarah Palin, who was McCain's like surprise pick because we were tracking like flights that were coming into where he was going to announce and we saw a flight coming in from Alaska and we were like, holy shit, he's going to pick Sarah Palin. I think she was like 25 to one at the time. So I think this was like a huge win for me very early in my career where I made like 25,000 bucks and it's like, oh my God, I'm rich now. So yeah, I've been betting on VP for a very long time and I kind of know like what goes into it and like the, you know, what people look for in a VP and that's probably one market where I have like a strong advantage. But overall, I would say, you know, I try in like picking shoes where I'm trying to make big bets, you know, it's based on like research, like, okay, I can look at the odds and then I do some research and most of the time it's like, okay, these odds are probably correct. I don't need to make any big bets. But sometimes it's like, okay, these odds are really wrong. And let me figure out how I can get a ton of money on this. Okay, let's talk about the VP nominee because I have some money in this market too. And I'll tell you just like my naive strategy, right? So like a few days ago, there was a New York Times podcast about like who are the front runners for Trump? And they said that it was between a Bergam JD Vance and Marco Rubio. Right now, there's not, I guess on the biggest Republican VP market on Paulie market, there's not a straight Bergam of bet even that you can take. So there's just a other. And I think both of those were, all three of those were in the teens. I believe when I, when I, when that story came out. So my philosophy was like, okay, if it's really down to these three, why don't I just put on a basket of these three? So how do you, how do you see that as just like a naive trade or how are you thinking about the market if any differently? Yeah. So I would say you have to be very, very, very distrustful of any reporting, not only for two reasons. Number one, the candidate is going to try and hide who he's going to pick as the VP. It's not going to be super obvious. And then number two, Trump is very mercurial. He changes his mind quite a lot. So even if we knew right now that someone was the definite front runner and we're like a month out from when he's going to make the pick, like that could eat even if Trump knows who he's going to pick. And everyone around him knows who he's going to pick. The fact that we're a month out gives Trump so much time to change his mind. And he changes his mind so often on things. So even if you knew for a fact that someone was the front runner, I still wouldn't trust that information even from Trump himself. Yeah, I would say that the other part of my trade that I did was I put on, so I bought those three and then I just set limit orders that were like, I don't know, you know, 10 at a double, basically like it like if this guy's at 10% and if it goes to 20%. Yeah, I was kind of thinking that Trump was going to do like an apprentice thing. Oh, this week I like Marco this week, I like JD and have those percentages pump that would just like that I would sell into. Yeah. And I would say in 2016, when you picked Mike Pence, Mike Pence came out of nowhere. Mike Pence, I think maybe a couple weeks beforehand was trading at like 25 to 1 odds. He was not really mentioned. Maybe he was mentioned as like a loose contender. And then he went from a loose contender to the favorite, you know, in the blink of an eye. So you just have to be very careful on VP that you're not bonding things. In other words, paying high prices and getting a low rate of return on stuff because unexpected things can and will happen, especially in the VP betting. So how do you think so right now on on this polymarket, again, it's like a bit unique because right now there's the other and that's leading at 29%. So that's some I think the other prediction, what is it like maybe other markets are like 20 or 25% for Bergen. So this other categories encompassing that plus any other rando he could pick. So would you say that that's like undervalued now or how do you think about the valuation of that particular market right now? I mean, I think if the market was extremely wrongly priced, I would probably make big bets and kind of correct it. So I think it's roughly, roughly correct right now. Doug Bergen is probably the favorite right now. He kind of he kind of has like a Mike Pence vibe where he can kind of fade into the background. And that's probably what Trump is looking for. Someone that's totally innocuous. Someone that can fade into the background. You know, Trump has a very like queen of hearts personality where nobody can upstage him. So he's not going to pick somebody high profile. So most voters, yep, they probably will not have heard of Trump's VP pick VP pick ahead of time. Right. Like, oh, who is this person? I've never heard of this person in my life. That would be Trump's ideal VP. You know, someone that fades into the background, someone that voters are like, okay, yeah, this person's fine. And then they move on with their life. So Doug Bergen kind of fits that Trump mold of who he would want as the VP. So I think the odds do make sense with the current reporting and the current, you know, feeling on who Trump is going to pick and what he values in a VP. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. The thing that made me index a bit more on Bergen was also just the the Rex Tillerson pick for Trump's, what was it, Secretary of State? Like he does. And Bergen is like a businessman who is, I guess, was he a billionaire or, you know, made a lot of money in business. So he has this kind of, he has kind of like a Rex Tillerson vibe, like the executive that that Trump seems to like. Yeah, I think there's a certain camaraderie there between, you know, two successful, well, we'll put successful in quotes for Trump, but two successful businessmen. Yeah, all right. Well, while we're on politics just before recording, you're writing a tweet about the general election. So Trump versus Biden, kind of like calling out Democrats for having copium basically, like saying the polls are off, for we're gonna, you know, put a high waiting on Biden's income and see in the Trump conviction and everything as like being these sleeper factors for Biden and the general election. So you're kind of like throwing cold water on that. Like how do you, is this something that you just think about in terms of policy in general or is this something that you're also expressing in the markets? Yeah, I'm trying to be, I'm not trying to take a big position on the presidential market right now just because, you know, it's so far away and so many things are gonna happen between now and then and it's hard to have a lot of opinions when things are going to change so much over the course of a few months. So I'm not trying to take a big position right now, but yeah, the tweet was about how Democrats or, you know, people that are normally leaning into intellectual takes on the presidential race are kind of upending that this year because they can't really handle the fact that Biden is the underdog, because they see Trump as a very unpopular politician, which he is and they see Trump as now a convicted felon, which he is, but they're not quite coalescing that with the fact that voters don't seem to care that much that Trump is unpopular. They care more about the fact that Trump that Biden is less popular than Trump is and they're also much more skeptical about Biden's age and Biden's age is also plays into like, you know, his vibrancy. Like if you, if you watch a two-minute clip of Trump and a two-minute clip of Biden and you asked like some person that didn't know who they were like, oh, what age are these people? You know, someone would probably say, oh, Trump looks like he's 72 and then they would say, oh, he looks like he's 95 years old. You know, so they're very, very, very different in terms of like how vibrant they are and I think that's reflected by voters because voters are like, I don't want this person that's going to, you know, moat around and look lost in public as my president. So there's number one, Biden's like not super popular. Number two, voters are super skeptical of Biden's age and I think that Democrats are kind of not taking these criticisms of Biden super seriously and kind of focusing on Trump and being like, wait, wait, why aren't you focusing on how unpopular Trump is? And it's like voters, voters take that and but they view Biden as less, you know, less popular and less desirable as a president. And so you have these polls coming out that are showing that Trump is going to, I think he's winning by like blowout margins in Nevada and Arizona and possibly, you know, he's doing well in Georgia and these were states that Biden won last time, right? So you have Trump like kind of flipping the script and whereas in 2020 and 2016, you kind of had these Republicans being like, oh, we don't care about the polls showing Hillary up, you know, Trump's going to do well, you know, Republicans were kind of rejecting polls, right? And now you have the script has been flipped and Democrats see themselves losing and they're like, oh, well, the polls are wrong, right? And it's kind of interesting because I feel like a lot of the intellectual people on Twitter are left leaning and so you have these people that are normally like they lean into data and they weigh heavily towards, you know, taking a very intellectual approach to things, kind of rejecting reality a little bit. And it's a, it's a, it's a bit disconcerting too, because it's like you can see people are super influenced by their partisan takes, right? And that's something, you know, just taking a bird's eye view of it. That's something that's like not super great about this country that people can can have their opinions so heavily derived from the fact that they love Republicans or that they love Democrats, you know? Yeah, I mean, I've thought a lot about this too. And the thing that gets me is sort of like, it seems like the Democrats have this inconsistency where on one hand, they're saying that look, Trump's second term is going to be the fucking apocalypse, right? He's going to like take over the government. He's going to do all this anti-democratic stuff. He's going to put himself for a third term. It's going to be the end of the world. At the same time, given those stakes, we still can't push Biden out. We can't, you know, like why are not more prominent in the Democrats saying like, okay, it's time to find someone else. It's time to do the convention. Power play. Is there this game theory where like more prominent Democrats start criticizing Biden? They know that, okay, that's going to make their side look bad and decrease the probability of him ultimately winning. They feel like they're trapped in this with this gun to their head. Or like, what do you think that, or is it just like there's a lot of career risk if you're like a prominent democratic strategist or a congressperson or whatever that you don't want to break with the party there? Like how are they not squaring that inconsistency? Right. I mean, I think there's a rejection of the fact that Biden is not very popular. Not a lot of voters, even still, you know, it's June. The primaries are done. And even still voters are like, can you please replace Biden as the democratic nominee like find anyone except this guy? And you have people like Nate Silver, who ran 538 until last year. And he's posting on Twitter like, oh, you know, Biden's not super popular. Voters are kind of skeptical of it. And you read through the replies and a lot of the Democrats are like, oh, so you support Trump now? Oh, why aren't you pointing out that Trump's a felon? And it's like, they're kind of whistling past the graveyard a little bit, you know, to use an analogy. It's like, you have to deal with the fat with the reality of the situation. Like, yes, there are many things that are wrong about Trump, but voters are super, super, super skeptical about Biden. And so you have Democrats not kind, not really dealing with that properly. They're trying to just ignore it. They're trying to push it. They're trying to push it by the side. And the thing about Biden's age, he's not going to get any younger. Like, there's no reversing this. Like, maybe you can give him some, you know, drugs or something to where he can have a little pep in his step. But there's no, there's no reversing the age thing. Yeah. Yeah. And it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. And the, you know, other side is exploiting it and doing clips. But then like, once there's that impression there, yeah, I agree. It's very hard to, it's very hard to reverse it and physically impossible. So then, I mean, are you, are you thinking that eventually like, like, say that, you know, this is the cool thing about polymarket too, is that they're that, you know, bets on Biden dropping out if he drops out after the debate, if he dropped if he wins at all, right, which could encompass someone else being being president on the democratic side. So like, do you think those markets are misprice at all given the, given the situation and like the copium. Or I guess another way to put it would be like, how much of the price do you think is, is copium and, and are these like, Democrat wearing road rose code of glasses, being reflected in the market? Or do you think it's, it's the opposite like the, the bettors are sending a bit more pro Trump? Well, I would say it's similar to the DJT discussion earlier. The Biden dropout market is, does a ton of volume right now because you have two people or you have two different groups of people that have very different opinions. You have hardcore Democrats who think there's a 0% chance that Biden drops out. Like, he's the lock nominee. It's happening. This is a bond, you know, I'm willing to pay whatever price is possible for Biden not to drop out. And then you have Republicans on the other side who are like, you know, they see clips of Biden online, they watch Fox News, however they get their media and they're like, this guy's a corpse. Like, obviously the Democrats are going to replace them. You know, the Democrats aren't stupid. They're going to replace him with someone younger like this makes total sense. Right. So you have these two different groups of people that are pricing the exact same thing very different ways because the Republicans see it, they're like, okay, it's probably 50, 50 that they replace Biden or maybe like some people probably think it's like 70 or 80% chance that they replace Biden. So when you have two huge groups of people with extremely different opinions, then you get a very high volume market that like, you know, the price is constantly fluctuating. So I think the Biden dropout market, it's been between 10 cents and 30 cents for months because people and it does tons of volume. I think there are people that have like hundreds of thousands of shares in going both directions in this market just because the views are so, you know, diametrically opposed to one another. Yeah, it looks like the top no holder is 700, 10K. Yeah, I mean, and so my view is like, this is like a 5 to 10% chance thing. It's very, very, very unlikely to happen, but there are a few things that could make it happen. Like, for instance, let's say Biden has a bad debate and he doesn't even need to have a bad debate. Like, let's say 95 percent of the debate is good, but if he like 5% like he stumbles or he has some few really bad moments, like the chorus of voices that are going to be like, we need to replace this guy. Like, it's going to be just huge on the day after the debate. So this is a contract, you know, I think it's at 25% right now that Biden will drop out. So if he has a bad debate or if he has a bad moment in the debate, like it could easily hit 50 cents the day after. Conversely, you know, if he has a perfect. perfect debate. Maybe it goes from 25 cents to like five or 10 cents. You know, so there's a big event coming that's going to change the price of this massively. So that's why I'm kind of like I personally don't think there's much of a chance that he's going to drop out, but I'm still keeping it at like a five to 10% odd scenario because events could change, you know, the thinking on whether he should drop out or not. And so you think, all right, so your current position is 53K on the no side, but at the same time you think that there is a chance, right? There's some event where it could trigger a spike in this market. So when you think about trading it, so this goes back to like you're being a full-time trader. So I assume like the night of the debate, you're going to be up there with your screen watching and like as soon as you are you looking for the one gaff that kind of you know, people are going to latch on to and is going to become like the Trump campaign clip the next day. Like are you looking for that moment and then you would flip yes or you just kind of saying like this is my overall view. It's overall no and I'm not going to switch with sides because I think right now it's undervalued. Like are you looking for that like it then again. Yeah, I will be watching this like a hawk. I will try and you know because debate stumbles like happen all the time. That was a famous one in 2016 with Marco Rubio, you know, there was a very famous one and I think 2012 with Rick Perry where he's just like he forgets the names of very basic stuff. So so this stuff happens all the time and you know debates can be unfairly punishing because people are just human beings. You know, a normal person can forget something, you know, in the course of two hours of talking. So even if Biden is at the top of his game, things can still go wrong. So yes, I will be watching the debate with great intensity and I'll probably be live betting, you know, if something goes wrong, I'll put any huge bet that he's going to drop out. And would you look to then sell that because you think that you know, is this like all right, you're going to sell this into people betting after you that he's going to drop out or it's something that you think like okay, there's this is it for him. I guess you'd have to just wait and see. Right. I mean, yeah, that's the thing about prediction markets is you kind of just like play it by year, you know, so maybe I'll try and sell it right away and maybe I'll be like, it depends on whether I legitimately think he's now going to drop out or whether I think that other people will simply have an increased opinion that he's going to drop out. So it's kind of like a game within a game trying to figure out maybe what other people are doing or if I want to actually hold the position myself for the long term. All right, let me ask you one more thing about politics before we move on to just like your general frameworks. So there was a guy, I forget his name, but he had a series of blog posts. I think one or two general elections ago where he was on, uh, predict it, which is like the one of the centralized prediction markets that I guess is still around, but he basically did like a Nate silver where he made, um, markets for each different state on election night and said, okay, like, uh, basically didn't a state by state portfolio of bets that on net, you know, based on like, is this state undervalued or overvalued on this particular market compared to the polls in the margin of error and he had a whole model just in the same way that the 538 model or whatever. Do you do that kind of thing or do you just more think of it and you know, sort of like take a portfolio state by state approach or you just kind of like calling each individual market as you see it plus the liquidity side of things or like do you do you take like this this general model kind of view for the election night? Well, I think in 2020 and so in previously years I've done that, you know, I've had like a master spreadsheet and I've had very organized positions and I've tried to be hedged, you know, and and try and create like arbitrage opportunities even within, you know, my own positions. Um, but I think there's there's just so much money involved now with with Polymarket and there's so many markets that it would probably be very hard for me to do that. Like if I were going to do that this year, I'd probably have to hire someone to like write up what what all my positions are. So I'll probably try and go into election night mostly neutral and then just trade it on the fly. Yeah, yeah. I mean, Polymarket just released their election map and like if you put it side by side with like the, you know, 538 map, it just seems like pretty on in general, like I didn't see any glaring places where like different regions are being called different ways by the two models. Like it seems like in general, they they follow each other pretty closely at this point. Yeah, for sure. And and just a circle back to that previous answer, like if you want to, if someone wanted to do that, they could easily do that. You know, they could easily create, you know, a position and like have a, um, uh, have shares in a bunch of states and like create like a map and like do like create a very sophisticated position, like using individual states and electoral votes and stuff like that. I'm just speaking for me personally, just because there's so much I'm providing so much liquidity in so many markets that it would be very, quickly run out of control if I try and take a position and then I'm trying to unwind it if things are going wrong. You know, if if I have a big position and then things were going sideways on election night, you know, that that could quickly spiral out of control and then I'm trying to unspool, you know, 50 position markets at once and it's just, it becomes unfeasible to do as one person. Yeah, and you're still, you're clicking buttons on the UI, right? Is, are you using an API that you're doing this or there there is an API, right? So you could write a script to do this. Yes, you want to. Yes, there is an API and there are a lot of API traders, although, you know, for prediction, you, you would probably want to focus your API on markets that don't move that much because, you know, the benefit and the downside of a prediction market is that the odds can change very quickly. Like this DJT market we're trading about like Trump could easily tweet while we're talking, he can easily tweet this coin is real or you could tweet or, you know, truth, truth, social or you could truth, social, you know, this coin is fake, right? And then this market that has done millions of dollars in trades and, you know, people are going back and forth, it goes to zero or a hundred in the blink of an eye. So there are tons of markets where you can API liquidity provide and you're doing great because like the odds are not changing over time, but you just have to be careful when the odds can change in the blink of an eye. Awesome. All right, so I want to, unless there are other like specific markets you want to get into now, I want to talk a little bit about just like your overall advice for someone who's doing this, right? Like it seems, you know, like obviously you're the, you're the top account, like who knows how many people are doing it, a non where there's, you know, they're not putting their name on it or they're splitting up their positions for smaller accounts. Or let me, let me ask you that actually, like do you have like, like how do you feel about your account being the personality that everyone's kind of like looking at your positions? Do you have other accounts that you do a non or do you feel that it gives you an edge to be someone where, you know, to have people looking at your trades like that? I mean, if you had asked me like six months ago, I'll be very nervous about my positions like being so public and people are trying to copy it or trying to like, you know, force like, for instance, if they see that I own a lot of know, they can try and bring the price of yes up and kind of like force me to liquidate or something like that. So, but but now I'm kind of like people don't really care. People don't really care that I'm, that I'm, you know, own yes or own no, they have their own opinions. So I've kind of let go of the fact that all of my stuff is in public because people don't really, they, I mean, I'll get DMs that are like, oh, why do you own XYZ? And it's like, oh, I own it for this reason or I own it by accident just because I'm providing liquidity. But that's probably the extent to which people care about my positions. And then so you don't think that there could be, you know, like, I don't know if you trade like meme coins or whatever, but like there's the handsome, handsome who's kind of like the main character right where he'll like, tweet about a meme coin and it'll go up, but he's kind of like the sort of influencer, but you think in polymarket that there's kind of a dampened influencer effect because people are just betting their own guttakes and there's not really a lot of like, uh, mimetic following of like the big accounts. Yeah, I don't think it's as, you know, like influencer driven as, you know, meme coins. I will say that, you know, if you're looking at a market and you see that like a very experienced account is on a certain side, like you should probably wait your opinions to that side. Like, oh, this person, you know, they're not just betting for fun. They probably see something or they know something. So I can be very skeptical if experienced traders are on the other side of my trades because it's like, well, what are they seeing that I'm not seeing, you know, because I'm a smart person, but I'm not the smartest person in the world. I don't know everything. And there's tons of markets where I'm making a trade and the other person is getting the better of it, you know, just because they have more information or whatever. And I would think, I think that also goes to kind of a question you were asking earlier about someone that's new to the site and kind of how they can find their space. I would say, you know, there's probably over a thousand markets on polymarket. So what I would do if I was, if I was brand new to the site is I would kind of just click on the site and I would go through the markets like one by one. And there's probably one or two or three or more, where it's like, okay, I think I can research this. I think I can find an edge and like you can easily find markets where the odds are wrong in a small direction. And they could even be wrong in a big direction. And then you can just keep doing that, you know, market by market by market and grow your account and grow your account because that's how I started. You know, I think my first bet was on, um, was like 10 bucks on like what movie would win best picture of the year, right? And it's like, now I'm making, you know, $200,000 trades as if it's nothing. So I mean, it's just, it's just a matter of snowballing your account and just finding like small, um, small edges and then just snowballing it up into like, you know, then you can become like a master trader. I want to ask you a little bit about, um, mental models. I was going to ask you about books and I see on your Twitter, which, uh, which we'll share D-O-M-A-H-H. What is it? Three or four Hs? Four Hs. Yeah. You have a ton of books. So we'll link to that to give people an idea of what's what to read. But I want to ask you in particular about one mental model that I thought was really helpful. I had two successful bets earlier that what, so on, on this account, let's see, the markets were Hunter Biden conviction and, uh, Will Elon's pay package be accepted? And both of those, I use the mental model of just, uh, I don't know, you call it like the base rate. So it's like, if you have a market where, where you know that, okay, in, in, in federal prosecutions, what is the rate of conviction? It's overwhelmingly convicted, right? Like it's like 90% plus. So if you know, if you see a market where you know the base rate is 90% plus and it's trading at 70% or 60% or 50%, it's basically a slam dunk just on the, the divergence from the base rate and the same thing with the Elon pay package, right? Like you can easily look up the rate at which shareholder pay packages are rejected and, or, you know, any shareholder votes, uh, the company loses and it's like, you know, 90% plus too. And Elon was trading it. Was it trading at 50/50? It was trading at like, like, you know, 20/30% below that base rate. So like, is that, is that something that you find is really helpful in and, uh, looking for similar markets like that? Yeah, I would say the, you know, what, what I was thinking about as you were, as you were asking the question is that both of these markets, like, heavily tie into opinionated things, right? So it's like Hunter Biden, people have very strong opinions about it. And it's like a partisan issue. And Elon Musk kind of to the same degree. And I think, you know, you can find people betting on those partisan opinions. So with, with Hunter Biden, I think he was trading at about 75% to be guilty. And I thought it was like 90%. So I owned a lot of yes. And I think people were betting on it because of the fact that, you know, his father's the president and they're thinking, well, maybe the president's going to rig it to where, you know, he's going to find his son innocent or whatever. And then Elon Musk, it's like, okay, you can actually look and see like what the voting is so far and, and kind of follow, um, voter accounts and stuff. And it's like, okay, yeah, yes, it's probably going to win. But then you're betting against people, people are probably more interested in buying no, not because they're analyzing it from like, you know, some statistical perspective or, you know, looking up past history of proxy votes. It's probably because they don't like Elon Musk or they saw some headline where it's like, you know, he wants to pay himself, you know, whatever it was, $55 billion. And it's like, oh, this is ridiculous. It's not going to happen. So you're betting kind of with facts against people with opinions, right? And there are tons of markets like this. And, you know, sometimes the opinion people win. But like over time, if you're betting on like facts against people with opinions, like you're just going to take their money. So is there, do you have a mental picture of who you're betting against, right? Like you, you, you just need to kind of find a story that you can tell in your head about who is the sucker on the other side of this market that's making an emotional decision based on like, international hatred of Elon or, uh, or a view that the political system is rigged. Like, you kind of look for that irrationality. Like, do you have any ways of finding that? Is it just looking at the New York Times and Twitter and seeing what people are debating about? Yeah. So I would say, and I would just go back to when I was doing stock trading. So when I was doing stock trading, I would look at, the most heavily shorted stocks and I would go through the whole list. And I would try and find the reason why people are shortening the stock, right? So let's say it was GameStop for whatever reason. And it's like, okay, well, they're shorting it because they're losing money. People are buying games via the console or via Amazon, like, you know, there's a whole host of reasons. And it's like, okay, why are they wrong? And there are a couple of stocks where, you know, because I went through a list of like a hundred and you only need to find like one or two where it's like, okay, I understand why they're shorting it. And they're, and this is why they're wrong. And so I'm going to buy, you know, I'm going to buy shares of the stock and maybe there'll be a short squeeze or whatever it is. So applying that lesson from stock trading to trading on prediction markets, you know, if you're going to, if you're going to make a small bet, you know, just for fun, it's like whatever you don't need to understand why the other person is been paying against you. But if you're going to bet significant money or you're trying to do it like for profit, like you need to figure out why the, because if you're buying something at 70 cents, right? They're buying it at 30 cents. So why is this person buying this at 30 cents? Like you need to understand their point of view. And not only do you need to understand their point of view, but you also need to understand why they're wrong in their point of view. So a big thing on prediction markets is like trying to get into the head of the people on the other side of the trade. And it's like, let's, let's dissect their reasoning because you, making the case to yourself of why you like something is super easy. And there are a lot of biases and it's like, you know, if you think of something, you know, you're going to overweight it. So it's very important to get into the head of the other side of the equation and kind of dissect that and figure out why they're right or why they're wrong. And do you find, what are the best places to find that? Like do you look at the chats under the initial market? Are you looking on Twitter? Are you looking at, you know, there's the probably market discord? Like are there any like particular places where you find like the to get inside the mind of the other side of the trade? Yeah. So I mean, it's just a lot of searching, a lot of talking to people, seeing what the conversation is like, you know, researching it and like research it from the perspective that you're trying to find the reason for the other side, right? And it can be, it can be hard to do that, right? And sometimes, you know, sometimes it's the case that, you know, you're betting on something at 70 cents and the other person's betting it at 30 cents and they're right, right? They're, they have found something that you have not found, right? And that's like a, you have not done your two diligence, right? So you didn't search properly or something like that. So it can sometimes be like a very exhaustive search to figure out why the person is betting on the other side, especially if it's like an experienced person. Cool. Are there any other mental models like from your listed books or or other stuff you recommend? Anythings that you find yourself coming to over and over again? Just the like little tricks or tips that that have stuck with you? Um, I, you know, I would say a very important thing to do is kind of understand the basic biases that you encounter as a trader. And I would go to the book, I think it's um, thinking fast and slow by Daniel Coniman. And I think people have criticized some of the studies and I'm not sure it's entirely bought into still as like a, a great book to read. But in that book, there are the papers that he wrote with his, with his partner. And I think they won a Nobel Prize. And he kind of goes through these biases that you encounter as a trader. And I think, I mean, as, as like a person in life, but that you can apply to trading. And it's like super important to like, to go through these because it's like, you don't even realize like you have, you had, they're so unconscious and they're like drilled into you like from a young age. So you have to kind of bring it to the, to the forefront of your consciousness and be aware of these tricks that your mind is trying to play on you for various trades and stuff like that. Got it. One other just kind of like mechanical question that that I think is interesting about Polymarket is that they're, uh, have this, this Oracle, which is run by the Uma Protocol, which is basically like the arbiter of if markets are disputed. Do you, have you ever found yourself having to get involved in that process and like, so like under the hood, like the Uma token holders are voting, uh, to determine what happened a lot of times. They're sort of like ambiguous markets where it's not clear if it should resolve one way or the other and it's a judgment call or things that have been found out to have gone the wrong way after the fact. Like, do you have any kind of like comments on that process? Do you think it's decent enough for now or, or ways that you had improved it? I mean, this is, this is a source of a lot of arguments among people that use Polymarket. because the previous model of how they would do things is polymarket would write the contracts, right? And they would, whatever it was, let's say the rules were like eight cents as long. And the rules stayed the rules, and then it would go into the Yuma court, and then Yuma would kind of interpret it, right? And then it was sometimes like a crapshoot on whether, on what Yuma would use to figure out what the answer is. Like, let me, let me use an example so I don't keep it oblique. There was a market a few years ago on whether Vladimir Zalinsky would be the time person of the year. Right? And that was the headline. Well, Vladimir Zalinsky be the time or Vladimir. Well, he be the time person of the year, right? And then you went into the fine print rules, and it said that Zalinsky had to be the time person of the year by himself. Like, it couldn't be him and Putin. It couldn't be him and other people, right? And then time magazine released this cover that was honoring Zalinsky and the spirit of Ukraine, right? And on the cover was Zalinsky prominently, and then also like thousand or hundreds or thousands, whatever it was, of Ukrainians, right? So it was kind of like honoring both Zalinsky and also the people. So then this was a source of dispute because Zalinsky is the person of the year, but he's not the person of the year solo, but is the spirit of the Ukraine a person. So this was a huge debate on UMA, and they ultimately resolved it to the title, which was, is he the person of the year? Yes, easy peasy done, right? But this was after days and days of arguments and the contract is, you know, going from 20 cents to 80 cents to 20 cents to 80 cents because people are absolutely certain its x are absolutely certain, it's y. So rules disputes can be quite disruptive to a prediction market, but I will say that Pauli market has smoothed it out a bit because what they do now is instead of keeping it static, like they write the titles, they write the eight sentences. But now if questions arise, they will provide clarifications on a lot of markets. Like, oh, when we wrote the market, this is what we meant. So if this happens, you know, this is how we think that the market should expire, right? So it's, they've provided far more clarity. So it's not thrown into this UMA court where you're kind of taking your life into your hands and you have no idea how these people are going to vote on this money that you're wagering. Yeah, I think there's another one that was interesting that I saw Lex node who's like a crypto lawyer account talking about. There is the market on the ETF, Ethereum ETF approval and, you know, the one market, there was, you know, obviously markets on this and there were, you know, he was arguing that there are two kind of administrative steps that need to be taken for it to trade and only one of them was taken, but the market resolved yes, but still technically it wasn't authorized to trade. So like, do you have, do you, where you in that market? Do you have any of you on that one? I mean, this is the, you're asking me to step on a landmine basically, but I lost a lot of money on that market because I took the same exact view where both steps needed to be hold on one second. There's news. Oh, okay, hold on one second. Sorry, I just need to, I just need to do something real quick. Sorry, it's just, it's just the life of a trader. My, my, my wife is well used to it, you know, we'll just be having a conversation and then I see news and it's like everything comes to all. Or if you want to share what news came in and how you, how you reacted to it. Oh, it was just, it was just a pretty simple stuff that they isn't the court in New York is not going to immediately hear an appeal. So I just went to the market and I just pulled my orders and, you know, later on, I'll kind of dissect what it means. I just want to make sure that if news happens, like people aren't taking advantage of orders that I have on the book in reaction to it. What do you do? Let me ask you this. Do you have like a, what's your stack for like, okay, I'm in this market. Then do you immediately set up a Google alert for it? Or how do you, how do you get your real-time alerts for markets that you're in? I mean, so if it's a high volume like important market, like this DJT coin that we were talking about, I have alerts for that, you know, and if stuff happens like, hopefully I will get the news within like two seconds. So it really, because there's so many markets, like I can't have alerts for everything. So I just try and kind of follow the news for 95% of markets, but for 5% of markets, I try and be on top of things and if stuff happens, you know, I try and be notified right away that way I can react quickly. And that's not only, you know, I can potentially profit from that, but also it's self-preservation that other people don't, you know, exploit the liquidity that I have on the books because I have so much liquidity in so many markets and it happens, you know, probably once or twice a day that someone gets a couple hundred bucks off of me because I have orders up and news happens, you know. So stuff like that happens. And I just try to minimize it. Got it. Okay, so back to the EETTF you were talking about, you lost money on it because you were taking the double, the double side is. Yep. Was necessary for it. Yeah, I mean, it's the biggest loss I've ever had. It was not, it was not super fun. And they kind of took a very, very, very simplistic, you know, in poker, we talk about levels like what level are you on 01234? It's like, are you trying to bluff me or bluff, bluff, bluff? Anyway, so they took a very level zero approach to it where it's like, okay, the SEC approved some element of it. We have headlines done game over. We're shutting this down. We're not even going to talk about this more sophisticated level of approval. But it's just kind of annoying because it's like, it's theoretically possible that it never goes through this second level of approval. Like it seems like it's going to happen. It seems like it's a 99 point, maybe 5% thing. But like, if we're, if we're six months from now and something has happened and they never approve it, it's like, you know, it's a little bit of bullshit that they expired it that it was approved. So it can be very hard to argue the rules, especially after the fact, you know, you can come across as like, you know, a sore loser and someone with like, sour grapes. So it's a little bit hard for me to talk about it too much, you know, and plus I just kind of have to move on, you know, because one thing about trading both from like poker and like stocks and like prediction markets is you can't get too hung up on wins or losses or you will drive yourself crazy or you will go on tilt or, you know, your career will be over real quick because, you know, you've, you've gone on tilt in the wrong direction. Yeah. And the way that the umo voting is set up, right, is like, you have to, if you, because I had a little bit of money in there was kind of testing it out where you have to vote. If you vote out of consensus, you get slashed, right, you lose your money. So it's, it's, um, you, you're voting, you're looking to see what the herd is going and trying to go that same way. And if you go outside of the herd, you will be penalized. So that does kind of suck if you're like the lone lawyer who really dove into the paperwork and understand that there's this technicality, right? Like there's not really a way that that can be rewarded unless that one person manages to convince the whole herd in a very short period of time. Yeah. I mean, it was such a high profile market that, you know, sensibly maybe they went for the simplest answer, right? And it can be very hard to argue for the more sophisticated answer because it's like, especially in this UMAs. So, so in this eth eTF example, polymarket clarified that this, that this counted. So UMA was kind of cut out from the process. But if it did go to the UMA voting and the UMA voting was decisive to your point, they likely would have gone towards the simplest answer because that would be the most likely to form a consensus on that, yes, this was approved. And the other just like big notable wins are losses, good stories that that would be interesting to talk about. I mean, the other the other big loss that's on the horizon, I lost to a guy named GCR that I think a lot of people know bet me a long time. I mean, I mean, we chat sometimes. I've known him for I've known him since before you got into crypto. And so we chat, we chat sometimes and he was absolutely positive that Trump will be the nominee again. And this was like, you know, maybe a few weeks after January 6th, you know, he was like, oh, yeah, Trump's going to be the nominee again and probably president. And here I am like, oh, no, this is this is not going to happen. So this culminated in a bet a few months or maybe a year after January 6th, where I was like, yeah, Trump's not going to be the nominee. And he bet Trump was going to be the nominee. And he got much, he got great odds. I think I gave him like 42% odds. So he's going to take like 250,000 from me, which is not fun. But you know, things like that happen and move on. And when do you settle that at the convention? At the convention. So there's still, you know, he's not a spring chicken. So maybe, maybe, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's two weeks. Yeah. So it's like, it's like getting out the actual real tabralis. Yeah. I've 99% lost. Well, any other just like final tips, I don't know, like if you were talking to someone who is like, maybe I should go full time on this. or maybe I should put a bigger, take some of my meme coin stack and put it on Polymarket. Like what are the biggest tips anything we haven't covered so far? I mean, first of all, I would say number one, if I were a young person, I would have a job and then do it on the side and then if I was doing something well on the side, I would quit my job and try and do that full time. I think definitely you should take risks when you're young and like try and make a career out of this because number one, I love my job. Number two, I've been very successful and then number three, you know, is allowed me like a lot of like personal freedom that I wouldn't necessarily have. So that's like the basic answer to whether to someone should try it. The answer is yes, absolutely you should try it because worst case scenario, you lose a few hundred bucks and it's like, okay, I'm not very good at that. You move on with your life. So I think number one, yes, they should absolutely try it. And then number two, you know, prediction markets are fun and there's a market on like everything. And if you don't care who's going to be the next president, maybe you care about whether this DJ T coin is real, like maybe you care about like who's going to win the euros. So there's tons of markets on tons of things. So even if the things we're talking about don't explicitly interest you, there's probably something else that interests you on a prediction market. So I would say overall prediction markets are super fun and you should try it out. Awesome. Well, don't worry. Drop your Twitter. You guys should all follow him. It's at D-O-M-A-Four-H's. Thank you so much for coming on today. Hope we can chat again. Yeah, all good. Thanks, man. Cool. Thanks so much.