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The strategies you are proposing are Too low variance to actually work. Your srategies will result in a very high probability of not finishing top 5.

The optimal strategies are

1. the HFT strategy

Have No life

have news alerts

Whenever news that would significantly shift a market happens wager a lot on that shift

wait for others to catch up to the news

Sell

2. The YOLO strategy

Find poorly priced options

wager everything using limit orders

Win contract and repeat x10

It is important to note that arbitraging the 2 UKR war dates is a losing strategy, by doing that you are blundering since the resolution date of those 2 options is way way too far in the future to matter. the optimal strategy is to parlay like a madman and to do that resolution date is teh most critical thing.

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I think you’re right. Since the goal is to finish in the top 5 and there are no real dollars on the line, diversification and making predictions strictly in line with what you really think is a bad strategy. That’s why I said I should take on more risk and hope I get lucky at the end.

My main interest was to learn how these markets work in an EMH sense (how easy is it to consistently beat the market). From that perspective, I would say that it was not so easy to beat the market—I would have to give up all my time and attention to HFT this thing. There are definitely persistent profits to be made doing that but at that point it’s less like picking up dollars from the sidewalk and more like deep sea diving to collect them from an abandoned ship wreck. Taking opportunity cost into account, it’s no longer an obvious arbitrage unless you’re a very unusual person (think the episode of Seinfeld where Kramer and Newman drive a mail truck full of recyclables to Michigan for 5 more cents a unit).

Since I don’t want to do that, my best bet is to basically dive into the most volatile security I can and hope it works out for me. But that’s just luck, not a violation of EMH.

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