Polymarket

Polymarket can be used to make money and to hedge against possible risks.

Trading / betting

Depositing

The default deposit method costs ~13 basis points or 0.13%. You can avoid this fee by:

• Deposit with card: For beginners, this offers the smoothest experience. You don't even need a crypto wallet to do it.
• Getting USDC on the Polygon PoS chain yourself and using the "deposit crypto" option. ~10 basis points plus possible bridge fee
• Getting USDC on the Polygon PoS chain yourself and swapping for USDC.E yourself. ~5 basis points plus possible swap and/or bridge fee
• For advanced users: The default deposit dialog is an accouintless centralized exchange that enforces OFAC sanctions. Any method to send USDC.E to a Polygon PoS wallet will work. Note that different L2s have different "USDC.E" tokens, and it needs to be USDC.E wrapped by the official Polygon bridge- not USDC issued natively by Circle.

Always test with small amounts when trying a new method first.

Trading strategies

• have ways of knowing orthogonal to the market and bet when multiple of those point in the same direction
• nothing ever happens
• thoroughly research things, don't bet on impulse, multiple rounds of analysis are good
• place limit orders to get good prices
• oracle risk (misresolution risk)
• avoid sports, crypto, mentions, earnings, and stocks. these markets are either random or too efficient due to people poring over spreadsheets already
• read and understand the market rules in detail
• if you think a probability is approximately correct, place yes and no orders on both sides and then merge them together into USDC later

For beginners, making money is more about avoiding dumb bets and bet sizing than betting smart.

Hedging / insuring

Polymarket tends to have a bias towards things happening, so it tends to offer poor (but still sometimes useful) prices for insurance. However, it can offer a potentially useful venue to create convex portfolios.

Trading strategies

• Avoid markets with ambiguity or misresolution risk. Markets linked to an organization taking action in response to the event may resolve based on when the organization announces it, not when the event happens.
  • Ask yourself if there is potential for semantic ambiguity before trading on an event contract and avoid betting if so
• For large orders in markets with decent volume, place limit orders at or near the current price and wait for fills to trickle in if you don't expect the price to move quickly on its own