Nothing ever happens. That’s why most traders lose
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.A few days ago, an American software engineer named Sterling Crispin built a bot and set it loose on Polymarket.If you haven’t heard of it, Polymarket is where people bet real money on whether future events will happen. Will a country invade another? Will there be a major technology breakthrough this year? Thousands bet on such questions daily, each convinced their news reading gives them an edge.Crispin’s bot does something almost laughably simple: it bets “No” on every single prediction. Automatically.
It doesn’t read the news, analyse geopolitics or study anything. It just says no — nothing will happen — every single time.He named it, with what I can only assume was a wink, Nothing Ever Happens.The project is open source. You can check it out on GitHub.
It even has a dry-run mode so you don’t need to risk actual money. A colleague of mine is trying it out right now to see if it’s as ridiculous as it sounds.Turns out, it’s not ridiculous at all.Polymarket’s own public data shows that roughly 73% of all predictions on the platform resolve as “No.” The dramatic event everyone got worked up about simply doesn’t occur. Most of the time, what looked urgent was just noise.Even more telling: an analysis of over 2.5 million accounts found that 84% of all traders lost money.The overwhelming majority of people carefully analysing world events and placing what they believed were informed bets would have been better off doing exactly what this mindless bot does.
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