a lot of the costs in the article are on net profits rather than gross profits (eg. taxes, withdrawal fees, risk of PI going under). I didn’t include taxes or withdrawal fees in that figure, but it doesn’t change the order of magnitude (and ofc it’s not clear yet what average tax rate I’ll pay this year)
you can make far more on a contract by trading on swings in addition to waiting for the final outcome (e.g. buy “Yes” at 20c, sell at 80c, then buy “No” at 20c and sell it at 80c).
There’s a large number of contracts to trade on for a single important event (e.g. to bet on Trump winning, you can bet $850 that Trump will win the presidency, $850 that a Republican will win the presidency, $850 that a Democrat will not win the presidency, $850 that Biden will not win the presidency, $850 that the next VP will be a man, and so on). They’re usually not identical, but correlated strongly enough that you can get a lot of exposure to the event. There’s also bracketed markets on e.g. the margin of victory in an election, where each bracket (e.g. Dems win by 0-1%) is a separate contract. A single MoV market might have 10 contracts, so you can bet thousands on it (and they tend to be volatile, so you can easily have 5 figure total turnover).
Overall, PI seems to be a bizzare violation of EMH where you can extract large amounts of money for relatively little time/low skill
a lot of the costs in the article are on net profits rather than gross profits (eg. taxes, withdrawal fees, risk of PI going under). I didn’t include taxes or withdrawal fees in that figure, but it doesn’t change the order of magnitude (and ofc it’s not clear yet what average tax rate I’ll pay this year)
you can make far more on a contract by trading on swings in addition to waiting for the final outcome (e.g. buy “Yes” at 20c, sell at 80c, then buy “No” at 20c and sell it at 80c).
There’s a large number of contracts to trade on for a single important event (e.g. to bet on Trump winning, you can bet $850 that Trump will win the presidency, $850 that a Republican will win the presidency, $850 that a Democrat will not win the presidency, $850 that Biden will not win the presidency, $850 that the next VP will be a man, and so on). They’re usually not identical, but correlated strongly enough that you can get a lot of exposure to the event. There’s also bracketed markets on e.g. the margin of victory in an election, where each bracket (e.g. Dems win by 0-1%) is a separate contract. A single MoV market might have 10 contracts, so you can bet thousands on it (and they tend to be volatile, so you can easily have 5 figure total turnover).
Overall, PI seems to be a bizzare violation of EMH where you can extract large amounts of money for relatively little time/low skill