John U.

The ownership of Trump and Kamala shares on Polymarket have REALLY different make-ups, strangely reminiscent of their economic policies. Thanks to @primo_data and Polymarketanalytics for the charts. Trump Yes shares are very highly concentrated. 5 fat cat accounts own 50% of the 162 million shares -- including the Le Giga Whale with nearly 1/3rd by himself. Those 5 will be paid out $81 million if Trump wins. Whereas for Kamala Yes shares, the ownership is quite spread out among the proletariat. The top 5 holders have amassed only 18% of the shares, with no comrade higher than 5%. The difference becomes even sillier when looking at popular vote, with Monsieur Whale and friends hoarding 82% of the YES shares for Trump winning the popular vote. That would be a $36 million payday. They have the market cornered (for better or worse). This is compared to 25% of the ownership of Kamala popular vote being with the top 5 holders. Slightly worrying for Kam popular vote believers: therealbatman (biggest all-time loser on the site) has become the largest holder of Yes.

A long-winded and winding update on Fredi9999 -- the person or entity -- who is singlehandedly rocketing up the price of Trump on prediction markets around the world. Spoiler alert: I managed to make contact with him, I think, and he blocked me after a few minutes. Sensitive guy! We'll get back to that. I'll also explain that large bettors unloading millions on Republicans right before election day is nothing new under the sun. - BIG TRUMP PRICE MOVES - Trump has hit 60% to win, and 36% to win the popular vote. Both prices now have at least a 5% Fredi premium (maybe more like 8%? either way, just a guess). So betting on Trump will be ~5% more expensive, and betting on Kamala will be ~5% less expensive due to a single trader. Why is there a premium off a single trader? He's bet $25 million (and counting) -- all of it on Trump. He has dumped in a large portion of that in the past two weeks. And by wanting so much Trump in a short time span, he is skewing the supply/demand equation; there is nowhere near enough demand for that much Kamala at the current prices, so the price has to move a lot to accomodate the demand for Trump. And then the price moves on every market around the world as people arbitrage it. How'd I get to $25m? Because Fredi is not just loading up his account and making bets. Fredi9999 is, I believe, creating new Polymarket accounts so it doesn't look like a single trader. Fredi9999 the OG account, second account PrincessCaro, third account Michie, and the most recent account Theo. Mark-to-market, the accounts have $28m in positions from those $25m in bets. How are they connected? The accounts all receive very large deposits from Kraken (usually denominated as exactly $500k or $1m deposits), and immediately start betting on Trump everywhere (and only Trump, 0 interest in anything else on the site). Theo received a large deposit, and plowed it into Trump winning the popular vote, sending it from 26% to 39% in a few hours. I pinged @fozzydiablo about these four accounts, who posted his findings here, showing patterns that definitely imply the same user is controlling all 4 accounts: teapaw.org/fozzydiablo/stat… One interesting note is none of the accounts appear to receive deposits on weekends, which would suggest that the person is not necessarily crypto native and is wiring the money to Kraken from a bank. Why they're doing it piecemeal is anybody's guess. - MONSIEUR WHALE? - As far as WHO is betting $25 million on Trump -- all of the accounts are names or nicknames with no apparent geographic connection. You could maybe see a German connection in the names, or maybe Swiss as a melting pot. But the real clues (or maybe misleading clues) came when Fredi and Michie both started commenting on the site, sometimes inexplicably silly comments that misunderstood basic statistical concepts or misspelled random words. Sometimes a lot of bravado about how confident they are that Trump will win and how badly the prices are wrong. Small sample of comments below -- one where he suggests you can arbitrage Pennsylvania & the general election. And one where he implies each state is an uncorrelated independent event. You can see the uncommon spacing around punctuation which strongly implies a French speaker. The French also use ellipses much more than other languages utilize them. Fredi uses a mix of British and American english in their comments, sometimes using the 'ou' in a word like favourite and sometimes dropping it. They called math "maths" which is the British version. All in all, AI thinks the writing/spelling/weird misspellings points to a Frenchman who has learned British English and spent time in America. Or maybe it's all a LARP and somebody is just having fun pretending with all of this, trying to seem unsophisticated on purpose. Maybe it's connected to Elon or some other huge GOP megadonor. I have no idea, and it's a bit of a game to figure out what is going on here. Maybe it's actually GCR despite GCR saying it's not him. GCR's guess is it is someone trying to send Bitcoin skyrocketing, which is as good an explanation as any (Bitcoin has skyrocketed along with Trump's odds). Why do I care about this? Good question! It's important to know who you're betting against. Is this a super smart trading firm and I should be scared? Is this an idiot betting on what he wants to happen and I should be happy? Is this just a lame attempt to give the impression that Trump is winning by a lot with 0 other motives? It's hard to figure out what is going on here. Almost always the answer in similar situations is not some big conspiracy, and it's actually pretty simple. So my best guess is it is a wildly risky-loving uber-wealthy Frenchman who is pretty damn sure that Trump is going to win. But this is also a situation without precedent. $25m all-in on Trump is a massive, massive bet. A little bit of obfuscation in the accounts is also in play. There's undoubtedly some interesting story underlying all of this. -FIRST CONTACT & J'ACCUSE! - I responded to a Michie comment on the site and asked to talk with him. After a few days, he acquiesced and created a brand new Discord account to talk with me. He joined the Polymarket discord and gave his biography for unclear reasons in a channel that no one uses. I DMed him and some small talk ensued, initially about Trump, and he very quickly got annoyed that I thought Trump could win the popular vote and still lose (it's very unlikely, but not that far-fetched, and what I would consider by far the funniest outcome possible). He accused me of insulting his intelligence, etc. etc. Arrogant for no reason in particular. So I just decided to ask him directly about the account connections. Not received well! And his whole vibe was standoffish and rude, and I also called him out on it -- in what I thought was a very tame and teasing manner. Apparently not, because it quickly went to 100. J'accuse! A racist in our midst! I've been found out. He then deleted his Discord account that he had created hours earlier. Pretty short temper for a guy with $25m on the line lol. (Side note, I've been to France a few times and it's always been very pleasant, so I don't actually think French people are rude. Maybe he is from French-speaking Montreal, though, a city brimming with impossibly rude people). Anyway, to cap off this bizarre encounter, ChatGPT definitely thinks this person is French now, because of his use of "And so ?" in the conversation which would correlate to "Et alors ?" a common phrase in French. It also took the ""What this tweet shouldl make me feel ?" as a bungled way of saying "Que devrais-je ressentir ?" Whoever or whatever Fredi is, maybe a Frenchman betting a boatload or a Frenchman as the point man of some scheme, Fredi clearly wants it all to remain a mystery and doesn't have any patience for someone with an alternate view. - CONSERVATIVES LOVE INACCURATE PREDICTION MARKETS - Conservatives have a storied and varied relationship with prediction markets. They are enamored and obsessed with the lore that nobody predicted Trump or Brexit, and the polls were all wrong (and they're right). This has become their raison d'etre in betting, and the events around which all bets on politics now rotate -- polls are cited when they agree, and polls are declared always wrong then they disagree. This interesting strategy of 'I can't be wrong' has had mixed results and some colossal embarrassments (like the 2022 "Red Wave" that never materialized and was very profitable to bet against). I find that left-leaning folks are more analytical in their betting, and tend to worry that they're going to lose on a near constant basis. But to the point here -- one single bettor ramming through huge bets to prop up a Republican presidential candidate has occurred twice before, back in the olden days. I remember in 2008, I would stay up at all hours with one eye on Call of Duty and the other eye on the order book waiting for a single bettor to show up. In an instant, bids would come barreling in on McCain and push his price up massively. It was a feeding frenzy to see who could match him first, before he disappeared again. A brand-new-on-the-scene Nate Silver was noticing it and writing about it, and Paul Krugman wrote about it as well. The bettor probably flushed around $1m in bets down the drain on McCain: archive.nytimes.com/krugman.… And then again in 2012, there was a gigantic bettor buying Romney up that @rajivatbarnard wrote about. This time $4 million: rajivsethi.blogspot.com/2013… Both times those people got BTFO. And if the point was to prop up the candidates, I don't think the price movements mattered a single iota to a single vote. This doesn't mean that the $25m man Fredi will get BTFO, only that one person barreling in with huge bets pushing the odds around doesn't necessarily equate with specialized knowledge. It could just be a fool. The odds are not reality, and the odds are probably not efficient. The odds will be wrong in predictable ways, but for most people including probably myself, the predictable way won't be apparent until the dust has settled. And then with the benefit of hindsight, it'll be forever obvious that of course [insert winner] was the smart bet because [insert reason]. Maybe Fredi has the answer already. - FIN - P.S. If you have any tips on who Fredi is, feel free to let me know!