All of sharpobject's Comments + Replies

Hello,

You're right. Most of the time there are not many prediction markets I would want to take positions in that also have enough capacity. We would be willing to regularly bet millions of dollars on coups not occuring in the US, but these opportunities are unusual.

Hello, 

This is just about ready.  You can reach me at robert.burke@ltcm.lol about this.

I should have this ready within 2 months.

1Liam Donovan
What prediction markets are liquid enough for a fund to make sense? (unless you were just referring to the crypto trading part?)
1bebbzor
Where do I sign up?

The exchange is mentioned in the OP and is not Bitfinex. Putting on this trade by shorting MicroStrategy and holding bitcoin is problematic if your broker doesn't let you use your bitcoin to collateralize your MicroStrategy short.

This seems silly. Perpetual futures generally trade at a much higher annualized premium to the underlying than quarterly futures. Also, quarterly futures regularly experience significant changes in the amount of contango, so it is possible to lose money if you are forced to exit early. Also, even if the amount of contango remains unchanged, if you are long the spot and short the quarterly, and the underlying goes up, you will have a negative USD balance that will either result in liquidation or paying spot borrow rates on USD.

So the quarterly version of the trade is a lot riskier and pays a lot less. Thanks.

1Isma
Really good points, with which I agree. Coincidentally, Arthur Hayes just wrote about this: https://cryptohayes.medium.com/all-aboard-4d50435190d6

Hello,

Thanks for the detailed write-up. My experience so far is that if I explain this trade in excruciating detail to individual community members, they require more work from me than is involved in establishing a Cayman Islands limited fund before deciding that they don't have time to read my emails because everything else they are doing has higher expected value, or they say things like "if such an opportunity really existed, mastrblastr would already have lent you seven figures, so why are you talking to me?"

As an aside, you probably do not want to do ... (read more)

1dr_gorilla
Same for low liq on the spot leg (had the painful experience recently with tokenized stocks on FTX), you end up loosing a lot of %PA with slippage...

FTX currently has a prediction market for "Will Donald Trump be the president of the United States on February 1st, 2021?" I am either about to lose all my money or gain six figures again.

To withdraw more than 1000 USD ever from FTX, a person must do level 1 KYC, which involves proving their country of residence. So a person would have trouble if they were only willing to lie using their IP address.

Trump is trading at 10% in a bunch of places! No clue, maybe people expect SCOTUS to participate in a coup or maybe they sincerely believe there is massive election fraud.

FTX fees are .07% per trade if you take liquidity or 0 if you add liquidity. I paid somewhere under 1% to get the money from IBKR into my bank then into Coinbase then into FTX.

Betting on FTX is not allowed for US residents. I'm a US person but not a US resident, which gives me more options for prediction markets than most people. I heard some US residents were betting on Catnip. While FTX is a web site that lets people trade cryptocurrency balances held by FTX, Catnip is a decentralized market, so in some sense it's more of a "real" crypto betting market than FTX.

2Tim Liptrot
Wow those are very reasonable fees! Suppose that a person in the US bought etherium then logged into a VPN and traded on FTX. Is there a realistic possibility of that person being caught, and if so what is the pathway? Also why is Trump still trading at 10% on catnip? With fees of 1%, that's free money.

At deluks917's recommendation, I bet about $265,000, mostly on FTX, and won about $142,000.

I was unable to "buy the dip" on PredictIt because PredictIt was not usable at all for me during that time, and I was unable to buy the dip on FTX because it takes about 2 days for me to move money into FTX.

2sharpobject
FTX currently has a prediction market for "Will Donald Trump be the president of the United States on February 1st, 2021?" I am either about to lose all my money or gain six figures again.
1Tim Liptrot
Good for you! I'd love to hear more about the crypto betting markets. I enjoyed betting on Predictit and believe I can out bet the average observer for personal gain. However, the fees push it into negative expected utility for me. What are the effective fees on FTX? Is it difficult to bet from the US?