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Notes -
More prediction markets stuff.
On /r/slatestarcodex there's actually a decent discussion of the prediction markets weirdness we've been seeing. It does turn out that there was probably a whale who bought enough Trump shares to increase the price from 50 to 60 over a number of days.
But, far from being an attempt at manipulation, this is actually a savvy trader who saw that the new Trump poll numbers had not yet been reflected in the election odds and took advantage of that. In the days since, Trump's Polymarket odds have crystalized at around 60% as traders have digested the new consensus. But if this was manipulation, it would require a constant influx of new capital to maintain the price of 60.
So what would manipulation look like?
Well, we actually saw it last night, when the price of Trump shares had a flash crash to 55 before quickly recovering to 60. This movement has all the hallmarks of manipulation.
It took place during the wee hours of Sunday morning, the lowest liquidity time of the week
The price immediately rebounded back to 60 as traders took advantage of the mispricing
Odds for individual states did NOT shift in concert with Harris's national odds
My guess is that someone in the vein of Reid Hoffman bought the manipulation story enough to try a counter-manipulation of their own, rapidly lost a few hundred thousand dollars and then bailed.
Takeaway: Polymarket is more robust than many people gave it credit for.
https://x.com/IAPolls2022
Latest Nate Silver polls are Trump 55, so it seems that polymarket picks up trends (and is noisier) somewhat faster than the model. Or that Nate Silver has slight Harris bias.
I don't think that polymarket can be manipulated (delusional yes though) - it is too niche to move voters.
What is interesting is that the media is moving slowly against her - I think that this is just a backfire of not giving at least token respect to the journalists/keyfabe. But coronations have risks. I think that Biden's Kamala endorsement was just a brilliant fuck you to obama.
55% vs 60% sounds like a pretty normal difference in estimating likelihood of low frequency events that both add up to 'this thing is more likely but not so much so that the other happening would be a shock'. I wouldn't call it evidence of major differences between models or evidence of bias.
Didn't imply anything of the sort - just that nate just made a post about polymarket overestimating Trump and then his trends moved into the same direction, just a day or two later - so lets see if it will get to 60 in next few days.
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