1 comments

  • idogrady 3 hours ago
    Hi HN,

    We’ve been deep in the world of prediction markets, specifically Polymarket, for a while. While the concept of crowd wisdom is fascinating, we quickly realized that to treat it like a serious financial instrument, you can’t just rely on gut feel or slow news analysis. You need an algorithmic edge.

    The core problem we set out to solve: Can we build models that consistently and accurately predict the outcome of specific, quantifiable markets before the crowd fully prices in the outcome?

    The result is PolyTools, a dedicated intelligence platform that leverages specialized prediction models to generate an advantage for traders.

    You can check out the tools here: [Insert your live URL here: https://polytools.market/]

    The Algorithmic Edge: How We Approach Prediction We don't focus on high-level political markets (too much noise). We target granular, quantifiable event markets, like "How many tweets will Elon Musk post between Nov 20-24?" The approach shifts based on the market type:

    Time-Series Models (e.g., Count/Frequency Markets): For things like tweet counts, interest rate moves, or weekly NFT volume, we use sophisticated time-series analysis (ARIMA, Prophet, or custom LSTMs) trained on clean historical data specific to that metric. Our models are tuned to avoid overfitting and are constantly tested against out-of-sample data.

    External Data Fusion (e.g., Economic/Weather Events): For markets dependent on real-world events (like grain harvest yields or crypto exchange volumes), we ingest and fuse external, proprietary data feeds into the prediction model.

    Statistical Arbitrage: We identify instances where the prediction market probability deviates statistically from the underlying real-world odds, signaling a temporary pricing inefficiency we can trade on.

    We need your feedback on performance! We're currently optimizing our models for low-drawdown strategies.

    For the quant community: What is the most critical metric for you when evaluating a new predictive model for a liquid market: Sharpe Ratio, maximum Drawdown, or raw Win Rate? And what kind of low-latency data feeds would give you the most confidence in our predictions?

    Thanks for taking a look, and we look forward to your thoughts!