The potential for insiders should be represented by a complete loss of liquidity.
"You cannot see the future. All we are given is the present."
"Of course. But if you look closely at the present, you can find loose bits of the future just laying around."
The stock markets of the world aren't a money printer.
The stock market is a wealth redistribution mechanism, not a money printer. Market caps going up are not equal to money being created. It's not like the shareholders could collectively cash out all of that market cap and spend it. If everyone sold all of their stocks and pulled fully out of the stock market until everything crashed to $0, everyone's cash would still sum to whatever the government printed.
The entire point of the stock market is to support an economy that creates value: take inputs that are worth X (basically, cost of goods sold) and combine them into something that is worth more than X (revenue), with the difference being a profit that (after interest, taxes, depreciations) is paid out to stockholders as dividends. That is positive sum.
The market cap of a firm is the best estimate of the discounted value of future earnings. When it goes up, that does represent (estimated) value creation.
Stocks have a fundamental value. Everyone would not "collectively cash out" - stock prices would fall well below their fundamental value, others would see a bargain, and buy the stock. (Unlike crypto, say, which has no fundamental value but is purely sentiment; well that plus supporting the underground economy.)
Of course, it is conceivable that something happens (nuclear war, say) that would reduce company earnings for the foreseeable future, and then the stock market would collapse. But that is because it correctly anticipates reduced future earnings, not because "everyone collectively cashed out". If everyone is wrong about the stockmarket, but you are right, you can realise your gain over time. Just hold on to the stock and wait for the dividends to roll in.
So, the economy is positive sum, the stock market is a wealth creation machine (refuting your b).
Next, on money. My entire discussion above was purely in real terms. Yes, central banks determine the money supply (commercial banks create most money, but central banks control it). But they don't determine how much real wealth is produced every year; rather, they try to control the money supply so as to achieve moderate inflation.
By creating more or less inflation the central banks achieve some redistribution of wealth from debtors to creditors or vice versa, but again, they do not influence real wealth creation (unless inflation becomes so extreme (either deflation or hyperinflation) that it affects consumer behaviour, degrades planning, etc.).
So, the question becomes "what is the preponderence of such bets" and "how many people with control or knowledge of bet outcomes actually participate in the market" - not "can some people see the future of any bet better than others".
Note that there is nothing in the rules of Polymarket or the other prediction markets that says it's not perfectly OK for insiders to bet, so I don't think it makes sense to call this cheating. Of course, this is a major absurdity of these "markets", but insiders are part of the game you chose to play by participating.
I'm complaining because it's AI, and also slop.
> resolves into "cross-venue infrastructure" — which is also a more durable edge than within-venue alpha
anybody who actually trades knows that on these markets, "cross venue infrastructure" (aka vibe coding some exchange api integrations) is much less important / durable than actual alpha.
even if we are very charitable and assume the comment refers only to like high-engineering-effort infra for trying to be super competitive on latency, that's still like the opposite of a durable edge, since everybody is looking at it. there's very little "hidden" knowledge and it's mostly a matter of elbow grease and careful engineering.
As a side note, the AI popularized usage of the word 'clean' to denote proper is physically revolting to me.
LLMs like emdash very much, humans don't use it very much these days.
Of course, it's impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed or not, but we're getting complaints about some of your posts and, upon inspection, the complaints seem justified.
The "top-1% winners are patient limit-order liquidity providers, not insiders" finding is interesting, and I'd love to see it extended cross-venue.
I work on tooling that normalizes orderbooks across Polymarket, Kalshi, Limitless, and Smarkets. From that angle, a lot of what looks locally like skilled Polymarket market-making turns out to be cross-venue arbitrage that happens to land on Polymarket. The same underlying question routinely trades 3-8% apart across venues for hours at meaningful depth, and a fast multi-venue stack rests limits on the lagging book at the exact moments the leading book moves. Locally that's indistinguishable from disciplined liquidity provision; cross-venue it's closer to FX triangular arb on the consensus price.
If your timestamps are fine-grained enough, a clean follow-up: for the top 1% of Polymarket profit-takers, what fraction of fills land within N seconds of a same-question move on Kalshi or Limitless? If it's materially above baseline, some of "skill" resolves into "cross-venue infrastructure" — which is also a more durable edge than within-venue alpha, so it could partly explain the weak monthly persistence you observe (the cross-venue gap closes when too many players run the same stack).
This might also be consistent with your insider-trading conclusion rather than against it: an insider on a real-world event has every reason to hit the lowest-friction venue with aggressive market orders (Polymarket: permissionless wallets, no KYC, no withdrawal limits). That's a fundamentally different profile from the patient limit-posting strategy your top bucket runs, so the two populations cleanly separate in the data even if both are present.