[blazespin]

Yeah, trying to beat the market on actually predicting will get you pretty lame returns. Probably do better in non zero sum games like the stock market. At least there you get the benefit of the market always going up eventually.

No, the best way to win on Polymarket is purely by insider trading. Which is why it's a useful thing to watch. Insider news..

That said, the definition of 'insider trading' is always tricky. At what point does it become insider? Some things people call insider others just call clever detective work.

[dylan604]

> Yeah, trying to beat the market on actually predicting will get you pretty lame returns

That maybe true in a normal world, but we left normalcy in this world a couple of administrations ago. I absolutely would not put it past a member of this admin to be keeping an eye on things like this to suggest it would be better to start the attack on specific day just to pad the coffers. Any other admin, and I'd say that would be an insane line of thought, but it is this admin.

[streetfighter64]

It's not useful to watch, almost by definition. If you're an insider obviously you want to sit on the information as long as possible and make a big bet just before it will be revealed. For example: the account in TFA whose bet was 71 minutes before the first news article about the attacks.

So how useful is it really to see a big bet and know that probably the thing in question will happen in the next hour?

The only kind of use case I can see for these markets is what another commenter mentioned, as a kind of strange insurance by betting against what you hope will happen. But even then, the finicky rules and untrustworthiness of the Polymarket admins make them much less reliable than a traditional insurance policy...