Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Who turns down free money?
[00:00:01] Speaker B: I will pay 50 cents on the dollar.
[00:00:03] Speaker A: I'll take 40 cents on the dollar, 30 cents on the dollar, 20 on.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: The dollar, 10 cents on the dollar.
[00:00:08] Speaker A: How about zero cents on the dollar?
[00:00:09] Speaker B: Do you realize how much money he just saved us?
[00:00:15] Speaker A: Welcome to the third episode of the 50 Cent Dollars podcast, a podcast about prediction markets. Today's episode we're going to focus a lot on election markets. If we look back at the history of pre prediction markets, not even too far, just one year ago, the story is about elections, right? Right now it's everything's about sports. But election markets have been kind of the white whale or holy grail that prediction markets have philosophically kind of aimed to get to prove that they are valuable financial primitive.
And election betting has kind of been in the shadows for years until last year when Kalshi kind of won this huge lawsuit to allow election betting on federally regulated designated contract markets, which means it was fully legal in all 50 states. And this was a huge kind of step function in the amount of volume and the amount of attention and the amount of money that could be made betting on elections. So just a bit of history, like when I was betting on politics and I decided to go professional, I think I was probably one, this is early 2021, January 2021, I was probably one of less than 20 people in the world who could make a living betting on politics, betting on elections. And the best guy in the world at that point might have been making 200, 250K.
[00:01:42] Speaker B: Right.
[00:01:42] Speaker A: And I wasn't making that much betting on elections. I was just making enough to beat my salary as an economist, which is why I left my job.
And now we fast forward to today and my guest here, Ayub Vec on Twitter or lost Zemblin on the Kalshi leaderboard or Liam if you're talking to him in person, if you look at his P and L on the Kalshi leaderboard, it is as of this moment, $1.4 million.
And from what I understand, I mean I've been tracking the leaderboard for a bit. Most of that has come in the past year or like in the past 16 months or so and so entirely since November 1st. Yeah, yeah. Look at incredible. Yeah, November 1st, 2024.
[00:02:28] Speaker B: Right, yeah.
[00:02:30] Speaker A: So this is like an incredible story and I think something that I want to dig into more about the history and get to know what makes a top election trader tick. And, and today I have couldn't have a more perfect guest in Liam here. And I just Want to dive into how election betting works and what makes you special as a trader. And to start, I just want to break the ice.
As someone who's been betting on politics for a living for five years now. I want to ask you, when someone asks you what you do for a living, how do you respond?
[00:03:10] Speaker B: That is a really good question.
I wondered about this a lot. I usually just say I'm a trader, and then, depending on how the conversation goes, I'll explain exactly what's going on. I'm also always curious to see if people have heard of this stuff. And it's actually quite rare. So that's one reason to get into the weeds, and maybe there's reasons not to.
[00:03:29] Speaker A: Absolutely. And that's what this podcast is all about. And for what it's worth, I think you're burying the lead. When people ask me, especially for the past five years, before people heard of Cal Sheen Polymarket, I would say I bet on politics for a living. And I loved, like, saying that because I would get this barbell of reaction, like the bimodal reaction. Some people are like, whoa, that's so cool. That's amazing. Like, tell me more about that. And I could talk about it for hours. And then some people are like, what are you doing? You're destroying democracy. Or like, that's crazy. How is that legal? And I thought it was just funny. And so, I don't know. I encourage you to try that instead of burying the lead so much. Oh, I'm a trader. No one really cares if you trade opt. Like, I don't care.
[00:04:08] Speaker B: Right.
[00:04:08] Speaker A: But that's just something. So tell me more about your history as a prediction market trader.
How did you. What were you doing before you got into this? And then how did you get into it? And especially what was the moment when you realized, this is okay. I'm actually world class at this, and I could do this for a living.
[00:04:29] Speaker B: So I got into it right after university. I didn't do any other kind of job, and I got into it just because I was doing really well. And I thought, you know, it'd be a fun thing to at least see if it would work and take a shot. And, you know, it did work out okay. I guess the first time I really thought I had an edge, which isn't necessarily the same as being able to do it for a living, was the 2020 primaries. I just felt like everything kind of clicked for me. And, you know, I started to talk to more people on Discord. I started to really understand what I was doing. I felt like I was making a fair amount of money. And then after the 2020 elections, after 2021, like March 2021, I'd had. I had enough money that I felt like it would make sense to at least try it full time because I had a pretty decent cushion in case things went wrong. It seemed like it'd be worth giving it a shot. And then, yeah, things worked out okay.
[00:05:10] Speaker A: So how did you hear about prediction markets? How did you get into it in the first place?
[00:05:14] Speaker B: Yeah, so the very first time I heard about this stuff was actually in 2012. I'd heard about in trade when I was like, 12, and I was telling my parents, hey, you should bet against Ron Paul. Sounds like kind of a stupid idea.
And so that was that. And I heard about in the 2016 primary as well. People were talking about. Just like, friends of mine, I guess they were friends of friends, actually. And then my friends told me about this, like, hey, you know, you're into politics. I heard this guy's making all this money betting on the primaries, the 2016 primaries. And I was under 18, so I couldn't really sign up, but I was kind of badgering my parents to make an account and let me trade. And so then I ended up placing a few bets in 2016, starting in August 2016.
And then I just kind of played around with it a little bit through to 2020, and I started taking a little bit more seriously.
[00:06:05] Speaker A: Gotcha. So that is actually stunning. You've been aware of prediction markets since you were a child and kind of encouraging your parents to get into it. I was wondering, what do you parents think about what you do? Now I have to ask. Do they think it's cool? Do you think it's crazy? Yeah, I'll share. When I quit my job to get into predict markets full time, my mom thought I was nuts. She discouraged me heavily. She's like, you're leaving behind a good job. You're doing this and that. And I'm like, I don't know. This is so much more fun. I can't, like, spend my time thinking about anything else than betting on this stuff.
[00:06:40] Speaker B: Yeah, I know. My parents are just very supportive in general, which I'm very grateful for. I think they were maybe a little bit concerned or a little bit skeptical at first, but they see that things are going really well. And I think it also helps. It's really funny. My dad, he talked about. He just insists, like, oh, you know, it's impossible to be a professional gambler. There's no such Thing. There's no such thing as having an edge. And I'm like, what are you talking about? He says, well, you know, what you're doing is a gambling. What you're doing is you just do research and then you have a good idea of what's going to happen. And so you're just. You're just predicting. Right. Which to me, you know, I'm not really sure that distinction exists, but I guess for him at least, and maybe for other people, it kind of makes sense that, okay, yes, you can sustainably make money on this, because it's not in theory. There is a lot of luck involved in practice, but in theory, it's not luck in theory. It's just about knowing what's going to happen or, you know, having a good sense of what's going to happen and then trading accordingly.
[00:07:30] Speaker A: Yeah, it's. It's interesting that, you know, as actual practitioners, I totally agree with you. There is no difference between the gambling and the speculating and the trading. But there's this branding aspect, like, oh, if you know what you're doing, you're not gambling.
If you don't know what you're doing, you're gambling. And like, actually, you know, you'd be surprised at how little we know what we're doing. I will often make bets where I think I'm going to lose. Like, if Something's priced at 5 cents, I think it's worth 10 cents. I bet on it, thinking I'm going to lose 90% of the time. Right. So, like, that people don't. I think it's an interesting kind of psychology thing that people have this, like, negative association with gambling. But, like, you can be a professional gambler. Like, it doesn't have to be negative ev to be a gambler. But, you know, that's besides the point.
I would love to get more into. Okay, so when we talk about, like, your history, betting on elections, was there a specific market where you made. You did quite well, or you thought you, like, were able to crack the code on something that made you realize, like, okay, this is like a repeatable edge I have. This is something that I know I can do this over and over. What was that market and what was your process at that point?
[00:08:53] Speaker B: I think the one thing that made me feel really good was the Iowa caucuses in 2020.
So going into it, I thought. But Judge was a little bit underpriced because I thought he had a really good organization, really good ground games, especially important in the caucuses. And he'd also been Focusing quite heavily on Iowa specifically. Right. His whole plan was to do well in Iowa and then use that to fundraise for the rest of the country.
So I thought he was a little bit underpriced. And then I bet on that, did fine. And then the big thing is, after the initial votes are counted, people thought Buttigieg had won. But the satellite offices, in my opinion, were going to favor Bernie just by an enormous margin. And the needle wasn't taking this into account. The needle was just kind of refusing to deal with them and assuming they would be the same as the overall results.
I think a lot of. I remember there was some skepticism. I just started talking about sharp traders. They're like, why do you think you know more than the needle? Like, well, just look at these caucuses. They're all extremely unrepresentative groups. All the satellite caucuses are all, like, the kinds of people that should be voting for Bernie. And so then, you know, so I bet. I think it was around 10 cents at the time before the satellite caucus. And then once they dropped, I was able to sell out for some high price. And so I guess just that whole process made me think, okay, yeah, you know, I can spot weird things in the market, right? I can spot these, like, weird ideas that maybe other people aren't thinking of. And as long as enough of them work out, then things will go pretty well. And then there are a few other examples like that throughout the primary. I mean, the obvious one was Biden got to some absurdly low number. Didn't make any sense. It seemed like if you just thought through, like, after New Hampshire, Biden got fit. Seems like if you just thought through, possible paths in the primary could go instead of just looking at current polling. There are a lot of paths where Biden just looked inevitable. Right. And so it made sense to not just bet on Biden win, but also to bet on him to win states like Massachusetts. In Maine, I think he was at 2 cents in Massachusetts, and that worked out. He did it in Massachusetts. And so then there are a few other examples like this through the primaries, I was like, okay, you know, I feel like I have a pretty good handle on this. I feel like I'm picking up on things that the market isn't. And so, you know, I should try to take this seriously and see where it goes.
[00:10:55] Speaker A: I think that's anyone listening to this and thinking, like, how do I.
How do I get an edge? Or how do I take this more seriously?
What you just heard is like a classic example of, like, you have to understand what the convention is. People are looking at the needle, what is moving the market, and what are people who are currently pricing it looking at. And then trying to figure out if that thing is actually right or not. The needle. It's so funny, like in the kind of the before times for prediction markets, which is not that long ago, um, the needle would dominate the markets. Like, if it moved a little bit. If New York Times did this and that, the market would move so much. And there's so much edge and just understanding how the needle worked and then from first principles, being able to detect like, okay, it's not pricing this part correctly, it's doing this part incorrectly. And having your own kind of internal methodology for your own needle was like, paramount to making money in this. And I remember seeing this just in action a couple weeks ago when you're on this stream talking about Mamdani and they're like, oh, well, the AP says like, their Mamdani is only up by this percent. And you were just like, if you're using the AP number, like, you're gonna get cooked, basically is the message.
And I think that's like just a hugely.
That is how you should think about betting on this stuff is like, what is the convention? What are people thinking? And like, why do I have an unconventional view? Because that's the only way you make money from a first principle standpoint. You can't make money betting on what everyone agrees on.
[00:12:26] Speaker B: Right.
[00:12:27] Speaker A: It's not how it works.
[00:12:28] Speaker B: Yeah, right. And obviously it's totally possible the AP will be exactly right. You know, in any case, it's totally possible the needle will be exactly right. You obviously don't want to just fade it. But the idea is, regardless of whether they're right or wrong, if you want an edge over the long run, you should be able to build it yourself from the ground up instead of relying on these sources.
[00:12:46] Speaker A: Exactly. And what I think, and I want to get more into this, is like, what stuff you've been describing so far has been kind of, I think, what people will think about when they think about betting on politics, which is like kind of a higher level analysis of the political landscape of the different campaign strategies. Like you mentioned, Buttigieg ground game was very strong.
Or Biden's game was very like, about connections, about the different paths that might happen if he went South Carolina, these dominoes are going to fall, et cetera.
One thing I think you do particularly well, especially with your, your contemporaries like Sharka Rubio. Yeah, kj. Yeah, I had to name drop them is like getting really quantitative with it. And I think the art that the thing that you've solved that makes you a special trader. And I'm just guessing, right. But I don't know, I've been on the other side of your trades. I've won money against you, I've lost money against you in various kinds of markets and side bets and everything.
But you marry the two, right.
Can you talk more about the second part of it, which is the very quantitative? You're in, the spreadsheets, you're modeling, you're working with very low level precinct level New York City data or data from obscure countries.
Talk more about your process as a quant and how you marry that with your first principles kind of political analysis.
[00:14:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:14:13] Speaker A: To get an edge.
[00:14:14] Speaker B: I think, at least in politics, the point of a model is not necessarily to tell you the answer. The point of the model should be to transform your intuition into a usable number. Right. So ideally, we all have intuition about, you know, some aspects of politics or intuition about certain things. And then that intuition doesn't necessarily map neatly into who will win. Right. Because, for instance, maybe you say, oh, you know, I really know this candidate will do well with black vote. Well, it's important to know how many black voters are there, how much will they turn out? Are there different splits among them? Like, do I expect to do well with XYZ group? And so the point of a model, the point of data, in my opinion, is to take in your various intuitions, your various subjective understanding of how politics works in one end of the model and then transform it and calculate what that means to the overall outcome. And I think actually the 2020 primary is a very good example of this where you might have some intuition that, oh my gosh, Biden's toast. He just got fifth. He's, he's old, he's seen that he's decrepit, he's going to lose. You know, this guy's horrible. And you can also have some intuition like, oh my gosh, you know, South Carolina is going to back him. You know, the black voters are going to stay loyal. And to reconcile these two, ideally you want some kind of quantitative model that sketches out various paths the election could go, right? So like condition on him getting X percent in Nevada. Now his new conditional probability in South Carolina is X. And then conditional on that, then his new probability in Super Tuesday is this. Right. And then you flush out all those paths quantitatively. And then you can transform these various maybe conflicting intuitions into numbers that will actually be solid. You can bet on for how well he'll do in each of these things.
[00:15:47] Speaker A: It is really all about boiling things down to make your decision as a trader as, as intuitive as possible. Because in the moment you, when you're making that trading decision, you have to act like you can't sit around and wait around like an academic and take your time and publish a paper. You have to know, okay, is the price wrong right now?
And making the trade. Oftentimes I'm in situations where you kind of have a feeling like you've collected all the data, you have this model or that model, but something clicks or something synthesizes that's more intuitive and hard to describe. And, and if you look at like the, the greatest traders of all time, like for example, Stanley Druckenmiller, he and, he and George Soros would always like, if they kind of had an early thesis, they would make the bet quickly and then kind of like figure it out after, right? There's this mix, like if you wait too long and like try to be too sure, you're going to like miss the trade potentially. So that's kind of the fun part of what we do is that we sit down, we do all this thinking and analysis but in the, at the end of the day there is this like, if you want to make money, you have to be a little, you know, hard charging with it. You have to be risk taking and, and a little looser than you then like the political scientists might be comfortable with.
[00:17:05] Speaker B: Right?
[00:17:06] Speaker A: Great. So one I ask you, like, given that you've been in this game for so long, how do you feel about how the space has transformed in terms of the volume, the liquidity, the breadth of the markets, the interest in this as a space? And in particular, one thing I'm wondering and I kind of, I'm looking at your P and L on Kalshi, so I kind of already know the answer.
But I'm wondering is like, are these markets going to become more efficient as the liquidity and order flow increase and does that mean there's less P and L opportunity for a trader?
I think there's people just like to add more color to that. People kind of look at like, oh, big efficient markets like interest rate futures or stocks or options. It's hard to make money or impossible because kind of like what your dad was saying, like this efficient market hypothesis. So like on this curve of like, okay, things were super small, unpredicted because you could only bet $850.
Now we're at this place where there's no position limits, but, you know, the liquidity is still kind of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars or maybe a million. On the. On the hottest elections, where do you see the P and opportunity going? Is it going up or down? And like, we're on this curve. How, like, where does it go? Right. Do you. Is. Are we early? Are we late?
How would you describe this, like, in terms of enterprising trader? Like, how would you think about this?
[00:18:31] Speaker B: Yeah, so certainly it's fantastic. Volume's gone up so much and like you touched on, you know, it's actually crazy. No, the market has gotten less sharp as volume has come in. It's actually really ridiculous. Right. It's gotten much less sharp. It's much easier to make money now than it was a few years ago.
You know, prices are much less efficient because the new volume that's coming in is like the first adopters to prediction markets are going to be decently with it. Like, how do they find out about it? They're probably interested in this stuff, interested in politics, you know, reasonably smart.
Like, they do it as a hobby. And then the next wave of people that we're getting now just have no idea what they're doing, so far as I can tell. And so they just make completely horrible bets. And so it's definitely gotten less sharp over time, which is kind of crazy. And yeah, like you say, usually you think, oh, it gets bigger, it gets less sharp. But no, it's not true, or, sorry, usually people say it gets more sharp. No, it's not true. It's gotten less sharp. Yeah. As far as what goes in the future, I mean, I assume it keeps growing. I'm not really sure how big the potential market is compared to what. It's just. I think the potential market for something like elections is possibly very big because it affects so many people.
Everyone has an opinion. Everyone it affects, certainly even a state governor, for instance, will affect the lives of quite a lot of people who are living in that state. And they'll be getting a lot of information about it. Naturally, they'll be seeing ads even if they don't want to be hearing about it on the news. So I think there's a lot of untapped potential. I'm not exactly sure how much of that translates to people willing to bet a lot, but yeah, certainly I'd expect it to keep growing.
And then as far as the market getting sharper over time, I think it's just difficult. I think it's really just quite Difficult for Sharps to counteract all the flow of new money coming in, partly because there's just fewer elections than there are sporting events, for instance. So it's harder for someone to build up a repeatable model and a repeatable process and to be confident that they're doing it the right way. And then at least, like me and the people I work with, I think we have a very substantial moat at this point just because we've been doing it for so long. We have all this data, we have all this just heuristics and things I think would be quite hard to replicate going in. So I'm cautiously optimistic about elections staying relatively easy to beat. Maybe they get harder but relatively easy to beat for a while.
[00:20:39] Speaker A: Yeah, I think the fact that maybe the two most important dynamics are this influx of new kind of quote, unquote, retail flow.
The ratio of Sharp flow to retail flow has very much shifted towards retail, especially as Kalshi has solved the problem of like, distribution, which is something for listeners who don't know about. The prehistory of prediction markets, like Predict it, for example, was allowed in this, like to be illegal in America, but under very strict no promotion rules. Like they couldn't put ads out saying, hey, like bet on Predict it or they couldn't integrate with a broker like Robinhood. And so you were dealing with this environment where there is like hundreds of shares in the order book or a couple thousand of shares and like you're betting against me or Liam or Domer or Jason Pipkin and like getting. And it's just, it was like a knife fight. The markets were actually quite sharp because of like the fact that there was less liquidity. And so now there's more liquidity, the markets are less sharp and the people who were sharp back then are just like printing money now and in various ways either by working on their own, like you, like your own shop, trading your own P and L, or by like working for Kalshi or Polymarket and getting their P and L in that way. So like, I think it's just a very from a market structure perspective, it's really about the distribution and the ratio of people who are, who are in this.
One thing that you touched on that was like super interesting is the fact that there are less elections than sports games, right? So people in sports betting, if they see a 2% edge, they are happy to just hammer it because if they get a 2% edge 30 times a week, right, like they are making millions of dollars.
Elections are so few and far between. Relative to sports. So I was. How do. I want to ask you, like, how do you and your team incorporate this reality into how you trade in particular, deal with position sizing when you detect you have an edge?
Do you know, like, how do you know, okay, I'm going to put this much of my bankroll in it or be careful or really go all in. And how did you learn?
Like, did you have bad beats? Did you have, like, some missteps that helped you learn, like, how to solve this problem of, like, lack of elections and position sizing and how that affects everything?
[00:23:10] Speaker B: Yeah, Well, I wouldn't say there's a lack of elections, to be clear, especially when you include foreign elections. There's elections happening all the time.
It's not.
It's not really very. It's a little bit boom and bust, but it's not really very bust. It's pretty okay as far as position sizing. Yeah. So in 2017, I lost my entire predictive bankroll betting on Rob Twist to win the special election. And then after that, I was like, you know, it seems like if you bet your entire bankroll on every single event, things are going to go bad. But, like, isn't that Max Ev? I'm a little confused. And so I started researching, like, how do you square the circle here? And obviously I read about the Kelly criterion. And then ever since then, I've just basically heuristically use the Kelly criterion. So you don't need to obviously trade it. Exactly. And you should use some fraction. You shouldn't use full Kelly, but just the general heuristic to guide how much you should be sizing. I think it makes sense. That's what I've used the whole time. I think it works fine.
[00:24:01] Speaker A: Yeah, it's interesting. Like, the Kelly criterion is a mathematical proof of a concept. If you have more, but it really boils down to if your edge is bigger, bet more. If your edge is less, bet less. And, like, you don't really need to get into the weeds of, like, half Kelly, quarter, Kelly, whatever. Like, just. I think this is one of those things that also just comes with reps. Like, you have. You feel it. You're like, oh, this is something. I can bet on this for two cents, but I really think it's worth 15. Like, I should. I should really buy as many shares as I can. Like, that's kind of the thing that. I don't need to go to an equation to tell me that. Right. You just learn that over time.
So tell me more about, like. Okay, you mentioned Your, your team and like the moat you've built. And can you talk about a bit about why you're so confident that like what you've built and all the analysis you've done all the, over the years. Not that, not to say I'm skeptical, I actually fully believe you because I know how hard this is. But, but like, why do you think your edge will persist? And like, what are you doing to make sure that edge persists? Especially as this space grows, the pie, the P and L pie is going to grow and the competition should eventually, you know, try to catch up. Like I look at big financial firms like SIG and Jane street, they're all competing with each other, all for that little bit of alpha, that little bit of edge.
And like, what makes you so confident that you're going to be, you know, the Jane street and continue to be the Jane Street?
What does your process look like in that sense?
[00:25:33] Speaker B: Yeah. So in the long term, maybe I'm less confident, certainly. I think that if Jane street unaccountably got into their head that they wanted to spin up an election trading team, I think we would at least have some difficulty competing against them. But we're just nowhere near that level. Right. The total amount of volume just isn't really, in my opinion, particularly close to level where it would make sense literally for someone like Jane street to literally spin up a team. And I think kind of the area in between where you have, for instance, like some guy is the easiest thing to say, some guy from Jane street is like, wow, this stuff looks beatable. I'm going to go try to beat it. That kind of thing I'm a little bit less worried about as far as why specifically that's the case. I think a lot of it boils down to my betting style that I prefer is pretty different from a lot of sharps. A lot of sharps like to look at polls, look at news. They try to react very quickly to new news, react quickly to new polls. They try to average the polls in a reasonable way. They try to use priors in a reasonable way and basically try to come to a reasonable fair value. And then they see distortions from the fair value that are being like maybe a Trump better is just really excited about Trump and they distort away from the model fair value and then they try to hammer it back into fair value. I think that's relatively similar to a lot of what options market makers try to do. Right. They have some idea of Theo and then they try to take advantage of distortion. The Dislocations, Right. So what I like to do is very different. Ideally, I like to create the dislocations. I like to bet on kind of strange or crazy or subjective or weird theories that will not be showing up in polling. So I'm almost always steady against polling in pretty much any big bet I make. I'm almost always betting against the polling average and betting against.
I mean, sometimes it's great when sometimes there's just so many fish flooding in that you can just bet against them. But apart from these ideal cases, I'm often kind of betting against sharks who are betting basically.
And the way I bet then is not at all the typical Sharpe methodology of trying to react fast, trying to use poles. Again, it's trying to find these really kind of crazy ideas outside the box. So the problem here is that the average person, even a very smart person, comes into elections and starts thinking about crazy theories they want to bet on, and they want to really move the market based on. Most of them will actually be crazy, just like you see in the name. Most of them will not be.
And so I think that just having experience, years and years and years of betting on this stuff over and over, and you actually remember a very crazy theory I had, I think, which was Imperial county versus Unschatie in the recall.
And that was completely junk, right? It was nowhere close to Imperial Accounts ended up way less than the recall.
So years and years and years of betting on this kind of thing, I think has given me a pretty good instinct for what kinds of crazy theories actually work, what kinds of data you need to validate the theories, just what kind of setups they make sense in. And I think that's pretty hard to replicate. I think the first instinct, again, just as a hypothetical, if you have some exchange street guy who's like, I want to work for myself, I want to price this. I just strongly suspect the first thing they jump to is not going to be, well, I think Latinos really hate Covid restrictions. I'm going to bet on Imperial county being to the right of Orange County. The first thing they're going to jump to is, hey, I have all this polling data.
Let me create a good model. I have all this order flow data. Let me try to model on calling market, you can see who the counterparties are. Even on cowshi, you can try to model, okay, what flow is coming from Shark, what's coming from retail. I'm going to try to model this. I'm going to try to be the first to bet on new polls.
Right, like that. That's the typical way they'd approach it. And then I'm approaching it completely differently, which I think is not, not a completely durable mode. I think, I think it's at least a little bit of a mo. I think it's not like the first place that a sharp would go. And there are a lot of opportunities in kind of the standard sharp stuff. And maybe I make some money from doing this. Like if there's something completely obvious like a poll hasn't moved the market for three hours, then I'll probably bet on it. Right. But so, so there are these opportunities. I make some money from them and certainly a shortcut could come in and close them all. And then they can make plenty of money doing that. And it might hurt other shards in the business, but it wouldn't really impact like my core trading and my core, like really big edges. Yeah, yeah, like the core. Because obviously I try to, try to make as much money as I can from whatever I can. But like the really, the really core edge that I rely on I think is quite different. So at least that's my optimism.
[00:29:34] Speaker A: I, I totally hear you. When I look back on like, I, I think the style of how prediction markets trade is that of a huge portion. I, I can't put a specific number on it, but like a lion's share of the P L is generated from these weird asymmetrical bets. It's not like the classic option style market making where you're like harvesting like 5 basis points of edge where you're doing it like 100,000 times a day.
Prediction markets lend themselves by just the nature of how they're structured and what you're betting on. Lend themselves to like things that are being priced at less than 5 cents that should not be 5 cents or less. This happens like with an alarming amount of regularity. And when I look back to the amount of money, all the money I've made as a prediction market trader, especially before I became a market maker, when I joined Calci Trading, I transitioned from being a taker to a maker. And when I look back on my taking days, my best trades, the vat, the line share of my P L was from like finding those weird outside edges that weren't like just, you know, oh, this thing is off by 5 cents and let me hammer until it's like, correct. Like, it's just, that's kind of this. If you're, if you're style of risk taking lends itself to being, thinking unconventionally, diving deep, taking, thinking like, against going against the grain.
I think prediction markets might suit you a lot more than something like stocks or options. And so one thing I wanted to get into is I would love to hear more about, like, what are to this end, like, the crazy lengths you have gone to get an edge. And I already know the answer to this question in one sense is that I know that you have gone out personally yourself and done your own polling. You've gone and knocked on doors of Latino neighborhoods. I think it was in Arizona just to.
[00:31:36] Speaker B: You've done it in a lot of places.
Yeah.
[00:31:38] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. See. So tell me.
I love this. I think you might be the only one or your group or maybe one of less than 10 people in the world who are taking the hunt for edge in election betting this far. So tell me, what got you into basically starting your own polling operation and what does that look like now and how has that served you?
[00:32:02] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it worked pretty well. As far as why it was just after 2020, I was pretty frustrated how bad the polls was. Like, surely, surely there was a way to tell that things like this would happen. Especially looking at the really huge swings in places like the Rio Grande Valley is like, surely anyone on the ground there would have known this was swinging 50 points to Trump. And no one really thought that would happen. Like, surely, surely there's a better way to do this. And then also, yeah, I just thought it'd be fun. I always find it really interesting to talk to people who are completely outside my bubble, completely different walks of life, and just see what their worldview is, see how they think about things. And so, yeah, me and KJ have done this quite a lot all over the country in various elections. And, yeah, you know, it's worked pretty well. I'd say there's two things it does. So one is with a particular election, it can certainly help give you an edge.
It can help you a understand, like, what the top line is, especially in a race without much polling. Can also help you understand splits within the district maybe a lot better than polling would. I can go into that in a little more detail then. The other thing is, you know, I don't want to overstate this because maybe it's arrogant, but I do really think I understand, like, the mentality of swing voters and especially the mentality of voters who are outside the typical prediction market bubble a lot better than most people. I think it's just from talking to them, because a lot of people, they'll just be like, maybe they'll answer your questions and they slam the door, whatever. But there's a lot of people also just happy to talk from all sorts of walks of life. And so I feel like just talking, you know, unstructured for whatever amount of time with whoever helps you understand how voters think and how. How they view the world, how they want to pass their vote based on various issues. And I think that understanding helps you in future elections. Even if you don't do any in person polling, you can kind of get a sense of what issues are going to resonate with what issues wrong. So the specific example I had in mind here was we did in person polling in the Texas 28th primary in Cisneros versus Quayon in 2022. And what we found, we actually had some problems getting response rates there. It wasn't for whatever reason, architecture matters a lot for in person polling. So in Texas, for whatever reason, they really like thin, soft front yards where you can't even get to the door.
And so we had a few problems there. But despite that, what we picked up was that relative to the past election, because there was a benchmark, Cisneros and Cuellar, I think the runoff would have been like the third time this election had been run. And what we picked up was relative to the past elections, Cisneros was losing an enormous amount of support in the RGB in the Rio Grande Valley, and then she was picking up a lot of support in San Antonio and in the suburbs around San Antonio. So then on election night, the first results to come in was Bexar county early. And I think it was like 85%. The support Cicero. It was closely followed by Guadalupe county early. I think it was 90%.
Markets spike up to like, 89 Cisneros. Right.
And some of us in our group, I think actually we're calling it persistent arrest, if you remember that.
[00:34:54] Speaker A: But, yeah, I remember very well, and I'll make it about me after you're done with your story. But I love that you brought up the Texas 28th district. Of all the elections you traded on, you brought up the perfect one. But please finish and I'll give my piece.
[00:35:08] Speaker B: Yeah. So then this whole time, me and Kelvin, who are the ones who had actually been doing the inverse of polling, were like, a little bit skeptical. We were like, are you really sure? I mean, it really sure seemed like the RGB was swinging a lot. Like, are we really sure this 80% is enough for Cisneros?
And then. And then other people in our group were like, no, no, no, she's got this. And then the RGB dropped, right. And I was winning it. Right, by 89%, whatever. And then he ended up narrowly winning the primary. And so that, to me, kind of sticks in my head as a great vindication of in person polling, where even this is a case where it didn't. Like, structurally, it wasn't a great place to do in person polling just because of this architecture and various issues.
But despite that, it's on this massive edge because normal polling will not give you a cross tab, or at least will not give you a reliable crosstab of RGB versus San Antonio. Whatever. Right? Like, sometimes they break it down by region, but these crosstabs are notoriously weird where it's just going and talking to people and seeing, okay, not only do people here like Huyar, but. But some of them said, okay, I voted for Cisneros before, but then I learned she's pro abortion. So, okay, so there's two things here. One is just the raw data of Cisneros. The quae are flipped. And then number two is you actually get a sense of, okay, why are they flipping? That you can't really see in polling. And the answer was, they learned that Cisneros is super liberal, basically, either since the 2020 primary or since round one of the 2022 primary. They learned Cicero is super liberal on abortion and immigration. All these things in Quaker is more moderate. And so then they're like, okay, you know, now I'm voting for Quaker. And that's the kind of thing like you can reason, you can extrapolate even to places that you didn't poll. Okay, well, another socially conservative part of the RGB is probably going to do the exact same thing for the same reasons. And so then you can have a good idea in your head going into election night of what kinds of swings to expect relative to the first round.
[00:36:46] Speaker A: This is brilliant.
So I'll just to give more context to the listeners, the Texas 28th Democratic primary was a very interesting election because abortion was a huge news story. It was a huge political issue. And Henry Cuellar is the only Democrat or maybe one of like two or three, but I think the only one, the only Democrat in the House who was pro life, like, staunchly anti abortion. And so this became kind of like the main platform for his challenger, Jessica Cisneros, a Latina woman from the area as well, to challenge him. And a couple of interesting things about this race was that, like, this is not the first, as you said, this is the third time she had challenged him in a row. So you have this, like, amazing Time series data, which you very rarely get in politics, like, where it's like the same election, multiple election cycles. And I remember.
So I didn't go. I didn't go to the 28th district. I actually, until today didn't realize that you had gone and done in person polling. But I knew I was in that market. I was betting against you and Sharco Rubio. I knew, like, the, The Sharp cabal was like, on the other side of my trades. And I remember looking at the. My model was so much more simpler but still effective, was that I just did a county by county breakdown time series over the years, and I could tell, okay, like, these counties, Cisneros is going to win, like, no matter what, she's going to win by this. 30 points, 40 points, 50 points. It doesn't matter, like, but the one county that was like, hugely quiet, hugely more conservative was Starr county, if I recall correctly.
And that county was, for whatever reason, so slow to report. And I, So I had my spreadsheet. It's funny, I remember, and if Brett Cannon is listening, like, he and I were in my living room in Austin, Texas, with the spreadsheet on the tv and like, I was just, like, looking at the market and looking at how is the market moving this much without having yet seen any results from Star county, which is going to be like, plus 50 for. For choir. And so I was betting heavily on choir and the margin market in particular and did quite well. That's like, one of my favorite as a political trader ever.
Yeah, I, I think it's one of the. Yeah. One of the few times I got the best of you in Shark Arubio.
[00:39:11] Speaker B: Was that the other side of that? I was not, I was not buying since I. Oh, you were.
[00:39:16] Speaker A: You were on my side. You're on my side. Great.
[00:39:22] Speaker B: Is what gave us the confidence, I guess, to be on the same page as you.
[00:39:26] Speaker A: Yeah, that's. That's awesome. Yeah. And so I think that goes to show, like, there's so many. You can kind of. My, my model was very basic. I just did the work of collecting the, the voting data and putting in a spreadsheet. You went the extra mile. And I, and, and, and we both did well because, like, we, we just had a strong pov. And in particular, there's a lot of money to be made on election night because the volatility is so crazy and you can get fills at prices that are kind of absurd and really just take the market to the cleaners. And so I think that's something that any Enterprising election trader should think about, like, there's the pre election, there's the polling, but then there's election night, which is like really when, especially in the margin markets, like, you can really clean up.
So, yeah, I think, like, what you've done, what you've built, you've taken the hunt for edge to I think the natural conclusion, which is doing your own polling. And I think the most interesting thing about what you've done, what you've gained from your polling is not like you create some number and you do it. Get an A plus rating from 538 or like you publish it. Like Nate Cohn on the New York Times, you, what you're getting out of it is actually quite deeper. It's about heuristics. When you look at enough polling data and you look at enough elections, and over time you do this over and over and over, you tend to get a good intuition of like, how, like you said, swing voters think. How do Latino swing voters think? How do, like, Latino vote, swing voters in the Rio Grande Valley think? And then how does that map over to Latinos in California? Right. And like. So can you talk more about, like, the role of, I guess, like, heuristics and understanding how, especially how identity affects how much you vote or a dex affects, like the. If you think of like the probability as like a log function or like a log regression, like, how much, what's the coefficient of like, your identity and how much it affects you're going to vote. And like, how do you conceptualize this? And what is. How does that factor into, like, how you model elections? Right. Is it mostly about your age, race and gender, or is other things matter? And like, how do you square that circle?
[00:41:42] Speaker B: Right.
[00:41:43] Speaker A: I hope that I kind of stumbled, but, like, you know what I'm getting at, right?
[00:41:46] Speaker B: I think I know what you're getting at.
So when modeling, in my opinion, the most important factors are race, education and density.
And then density.
Density is the trickiest one to measure. There's different metrics you can use.
[00:42:00] Speaker A: I have population density.
[00:42:02] Speaker B: Yeah, population density, which incidentally is quite tricky just because if you want to look at like, how many people live in the county divided by the area of the county, it's not very helpful because it includes all this random land. Right. So what I like to calculate is weighted block level weighted median by precinct. So the block level weighted median population density for a given precinct, I think is the most useful. Is this census.
Yeah, exactly. Census block. Yeah.
Because then that gives you a sense of, okay, where are people actually living? And I think 538 does this. Like how many people in five mile radius, which I don't agree with. I think it should be smaller. Like I said, I really think it should be block. But there's various disagreements here. Another thing that helps with density, it's quite correlated, is percent renting picks up on a lot of the same factors as density.
And anyway, so those are the top three.
You sound really serious.
[00:42:54] Speaker A: No. So in a previous life I was a housing economist.
[00:42:58] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:42:58] Speaker A: And then I, so I was a housing economist at Zillow and then I was a labor economist at Indeed. So like working with census data and also the big data from the company, the tech companies themselves. And so when you just dropped percent renting as like a kind of like an instrumental variable for like density, that just blew me away. I never thought about that. But like, that's genius. And this is the kind of, you know, I just wanted, like for the readers listening to this, like, this is how deep it can get, right? Like you can, you're, you're. The Liam here is doing analysis that's like on par or better than like what economists at top universities are doing or political scientists. And I think that like goes to show, like, okay, you don't need a PhD or whatever. You just need the motivation. When there's money on the line and your skin is in the game, you will go to that length of like modeling percent rent as like an instrumental variable in your turnout model. Like, like that's just like so sick to me. You know, and the corollary to sports is like the way people model. Like, I don't know, I've heard of this one really sharp golf better. Who is able to tell like, oh, golfers tend to. Which golfers tend to do well when it rained the day before? Like, how do you even like, think of that? But it's just when you, when you take it to that take it to the natural edge, the final frontier of finding edge. It's just incredible. So, I mean, we could talk about this for hours. I think it's so cool, the depth of edge. And I would encourage you, you should write more about this and talk more about it just to get people interested.
But we'll move on to some other things because like I said, we could just do hours of this.
One thing I wanted to ask you about is like, where do you feel like this industry of election trading is going high level? Do you think there are going to be hedge funds that manage like a billion dollars Trading on elections. Do you think that there's going to be serious institutional hedging and risk transfer on these markets? And what does that, what does that mean for you as a professional? Does that excite you?
Does do you not like think about it that much? You just kind of focus on the next election like big picture?
Does, does election betting kind of like start to get truly, truly big? And, and where do you see yourself positioned in this world?
[00:45:34] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't really think there's ever going to be enough speculative volume to support a billion dollar hedge fund during elections. I just don't really think that makes sense. What I do think makes sense is what you touched on that elections, especially national elections, and you can see this a lot in foreign countries, they will clearly affect the financial markets. We just saw this in Argentina. That peso was enormously correlated to the results in the Argentine legislative election.
So like you said, this is a very clear opportunity. And I hope companies do this. I think they really should do this is lay off their risk by hedging in election.
So instead of trying to hire people to try to price the election super accurately as it affects the rest of their portfolio, why not just hedge off your election risk in the prediction market and then you can focus on, okay, given a 60% chance of Malaysia's party getting a majority, this is what I think Facebook would do, which is more like their area of expertise, it's more applicable broadly. So I guess that's what I'd say. And certainly you could maybe imagine a billion dollar hedge fund having an elections department.
My guess is it's not the best use of their money because you can just look at prediction markets and yeah, certainly, certainly they get more volume.
Yeah. I mean trade forex or trade stocks. I mean, I know people always talk about in the US there's certain stocks that are correlated with Democrats doing well, certain stocks are correlated with Republicans doing well. So there's always trades like this to be made. And I think that that's what would make more sense for hedge funds. Right. Is to focus more on if the election result is accuracy, then these stocks will do well or these options and so on will do well. And then either use the prediction markets or hedge on the prediction markets because they aren't getting to the volume, especially something that the US presidential market, it is getting to the volume where you can hedge on it. And then the last thing I want to say is I think sometimes when Trad 5 people hear the hedging pitch, they're like, this is ridiculous. The Volume in these markets is nowhere near what we need. In some cases that's true. But I think people underestimate the extent to which you can incentivize volume. Right. Like if you post like there are sharks watching these markets. If you post big orders that are like 5, 7 cents off fair, like you will get filled and maybe you don't want to give up that much ad that's completely reasonable. But for instance, like let's say you spot a big trade where it's like conditional on the prediction market being within $0.07 of like additional fair value being within $0.07 of the prediction market price in this election, this financial instrument is massively underpriced. Like you could put on that hedge, you could move the prediction market up into, you know, you could move it by five heads, you could get a lot more fills than you might think at that range and then, you know, and then you execute the other leg of the trade and then you, you, you, you've made money that way. Right? So that's just something I want to flag. One great example of this, if you're curious, is the London mayor race. This guy fox, fox007 got it into his head to bet a million dollars just aggressively into the market in the space of a few days on Lambdani.
And I think he only moved the market like 4 or 5 cents. And again, this is a market that was not necessarily super liquid. If you looked at it beforehand, you wouldn't necessarily thought it would solve a million dollars. But once he started going in, it drew in all these sharks to counter him at some premium, like a 5 cent premium. But nothing enormously crazy. So I'm just saying don't underrate how much hidden liquidity there is in these markets.
[00:48:43] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I think the way these markets are structured is because it's all displayed size and it's all on an order book. People just think, okay, I want to bet 10 million. How much slippage would I cause if I bet 10 million right now? And like that's not actually how it works. And that's not how it works in the financial markets too. If you want to make a big bet, you go through an rfq, like you talk to a trader at a desk who will then manage the order for you. Like if you want the size there, like you said. I think the great term you just said was like hidden liquidity. If you're willing to pay $0.05 over what their current market fare is, you can probably get millions and millions of fills. And so, and if you find A trade where like, okay, I can buy if I'm willing to pay 7. I have this thesis where I pay overpay to market $0.06 for Malay in Argentina. But then I like put like literally $1 billion long, you know, or short on the peso, on Argentinian peso. Like what you can do effectively is then draw in the liquidity of the forex market into the prediction market. Right? And so maybe that might be your lane. Like you're so specialized in elections, like you could start a hedge fund where it's event driven. Like there's these event driven hedge funds that trade stocks based on events like mergers or trade forex based on elections. And like maybe that's how you get to the billion dollar aum. Maybe you can't ever put a billion dollars on the Argentinian prediction market. But like you can in a roundabout way. And like that's maybe what the future of this, of this looks like.
So yeah. And have you ever thought about that? Do you trade forex? You trade stocks, bonds, anything like that based on your alpha that you've gotten from elections?
[00:50:27] Speaker B: Yeah, I've certainly thought about it. The thing is, prediction markets are plenty liquid for me at the moment. So this is part one is even if I want to bet, you know, $500,000, usually I could do that. It's pretty rare that you need to look around.
And then part two is, you know, I don't necessarily know conditional on this person winning, what is the peso going to do? And I'm always going to be adversely selected against, right? Like if I try to do so, I see the prediction market, I see like say the peso price. And for whatever reason I think the peso price looks like a much better deal than the prediction market. There's just massive adverse selection there because the people trading the peso can also see the prediction market, but they actually know how to trade the peso. Right. So in general I'm quite wary of doing that. I mean, I certainly don't rule it out. It's certainly something I thought about. But in general, to me it just makes a lot more sense that I trade on the prediction market. And then if you have an opinion about the peso, you can put it on a trade that otherwise wouldn't make sense by hedging out the election risk on the prediction, you know, and then, and then I'll sell that.
[00:51:22] Speaker A: This is brilliant. This is, this is why I love markets. It's just like, okay, yeah, focus on your thing and then you'll do the service of taking the risk from someone else who wants to do their thing. And this is why markets work. And it's just, I don't know, it's just a beautiful thing to me. I'm such a nerd about it. But okay, so let's lastly, and this conversation has been excellent. I wish we could just go on forever. But to wrap it up, I'm wondering if someone say like an enterprising young 22 year old out of college is like trying to figure out their way in the world. And they say, they tell you like, I want to be you in five years or I want to be you in 10 years.
Like what advice would you give to them? And would you encourage them or discourage them? And, and how should someone get involved from a practical sense in election trading? And yeah, just overall, what advice would you give to them?
[00:52:16] Speaker B: First of all, I think it's a good idea. I find it really interesting. I listen to sports betting content just because there is no prediction market content. And one thing I noticed is all the sports bettors seem to say, don't get into sports betting. This industry is a wreck, it's dying. Whatever. I say the exact opposite.
You should get into prediction markets if you want to because it's the opposite of die.
For instance, if I go to a sports bettor and I say my model is showing a 30 cent edge on this liquid market with millions of dollars of volume, they would probably say, you're insane, your model has a major bug, you should fix it. No, in prediction markets I show 30 cent edges all the time. And if I was showing 30 cent edges on things, they were actually 2%, I would go bust because I bet my edges.
I'm not cautious about this. I bet my edges. According to Kelly, these edges do exist. There are real large edges in prediction that people just don't trade on. So I would say yes, it's a fantastic time to get into prediction markets. You should definitely do it. As far as brief advice, I would say just start trading. Just start coming up with hypotheses, trying to test them, trade against the market and see how well you do. The other thing I'd say again, I'm thinking about if you have a sports betting audience, what are salient differences? And one enormous difference you have to keep in mind is the bigger the market, the easier it is to be, which is the exact opposite of sports betting. I think a lot of people get this in very, very confused. Like if you're a sports bettor, you want to get into prediction, like oh my gosh, I don't know if I can handle the main market. I'm going to tackle the margin market. That's a horrible idea because the margin market, most of the money there is sharp. It's much, much harder to beat the margin market than the main market. And in fact, one heuristic that isn't terrible is you just look at the probabilities implied by the margin and often there will be a discrepancy from the main market and almost always that discrepancy will tell you what the sharp side is on the main.
So I guess that would be my main advice is stick to the bigger markets, paradoxically, and just come up with ideas and try to test them. And I guess the last piece of advice I'd have is don't overpay for your ideas.
Have a good sense of what the conventional wisdom says the price should be without getting into anything very speculative, just purely like polls, fundraising, priors, just the normal stuff. And don't wildly overpay for a speculative edge. Try to find cases where either you don't pay very much over convictual wisdom or ideally you actually get paid right, because people are disordered and wrong direction.
Find examples like that. So just quickly, in the Mamdani market, for instance, I already thought Mamdani was underpriced before Foxfox came in and then Foxbucks came in and that made me extremely excited to bet on Momdani, right? Because now it's actually being distorted completely in the wrong direction. So I'm getting paid for my idiosyncratic take that. Momdani has a better chance than people think, right? And so I would say basically look for situations like that. Have a very clear sense of what you're paying for your thesis. But have thesis, don't just go into convictualism. Have interesting speculative ideas, ideally backed by data, and just go over time and see how it goes.
[00:54:56] Speaker A: Yeah, I fully agree.
I think if you want to take this seriously, you can read up about portfolio construction, position sizing, et cetera, et cetera, but don't get too caught up in that stuff.
Think more about, like, how am I unconventional? Or like, what ideas do I have that are not potentially being priced in. So, I mean, I'll share my example. My mum Donnie betting story was that like I was.
How do I say I'm like pretty into this sounds so crazy and random, but I'm pretty into dance music, right? So I live in Brooklyn and I love the. There's like a lot of dance clubs out There and especially like house music and techno. And the house and techno scene tends to be like very left leaning, like very far left in a way that I don't really relate to their politics at all. But I'm steeped in the culture and I'm aware of it. And so two things happened to me in my real life, especially as a New Yorker living in New York, that gave me an edge. One, there was this like techno festival called Dripping.
Dripping is like a random techno festival in like the woods in New Jersey. And very early on, back when Mamdani was only 1 to 3 cents in the markets, they released this big thing about how they are endorsing Zoran Mamdani for mayor. And I'm like, why does this, why is a techno festival like endorsing this? This doesn't make any sense at all. Like it's kind of an interesting thing. Why? What is this energy, right? This early energy that he has. And then I look at his TikTok and like his tiktoks are blowing up millions and millions of views. And this is happening over the course of like a couple weeks, right? And polls understanding that polls are like several weeks, by the time a poll comes out there, the polling period has been ended like two, three weeks ago. And then they took another like week to analyze the data. So the polls are already really slow. But like you can look at like alt data to see like what is like, you know, what might give you an edge. And then finally the big turning point for me was like when I was at a show where Avalon Emerson, who's like a decently well known dj, she spliced in a clip from the Mamdani debate where he was like, it's spelled M A M D A N I and you should learn how like that massive like big viral moment, she put it into like a UK garage, like drop and like the whole crowd, crowd went absolutely crazy. And I was there feeling the energy of the crowd. I'm like, this is something else.
[00:57:36] Speaker B: This is.
[00:57:36] Speaker A: Mamdani cannot possibly be worth only 5 cents on Kalshi. Like this is something, this is my in person polling where like the energy in that room at that moment reminded me of like, wow, this is how like people must have felt about Obama in like early 2008 or like late 2007. The energy around him was, was like palpable. So I don't know that kind of. If you're looking into betting prediction markets especially think about like where you might have an edge. I lived in New York, I was like involved in like more left leaning DSA socialist kind of communities just by going to dance music shows. And like I had an edge and I was, I started betting on him heavily around the 6 cent mark and like, you know that that was for the primary. So you know, it just goes to show like this isn't sports betting, this isn't options. This is something truly so different in like so many ways that like it opens up this huge design space for having, yeah, like 20:30 cent edges that like people can't have because you're doing to do the work or you're willing to find something unique. Well anyways, we'll wrap it up now. Is there anything like that you want to plug that you have? You want people to follow your Twitter or do you have a subsec or anything that you want to like, get out there?
Let me know.
[00:58:54] Speaker B: Yeah, I got my Twitter yambeck, Jesse Richardson, political Kiwi Sharka, Rubio has gone by many names in this podcast, has a great substack which I would definitely.
[00:59:01] Speaker A: Recommend the Golden Path if I. Yeah.
[00:59:04] Speaker B: The golden Path, exactly.
[00:59:05] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely follow these guys. They are posting, they're posting, they're not going to tell you exactly how to model and how to bet, but they're giving you clues right, about like how deep you can go and like where the edge actually is in election markets. And I think it's just fascinating.
Regardless of whether you're betting on this, it really goes to show, like, wow, these markets both paradoxically can be very unsharp and very profitable if you're sharp. But then also you can, when you look at the markets, you think, okay, we have people like Liam who are making this price and I can trust this instead of the poll or instead of some hack on Twitter.
Okay, yeah, so we'll wrap it up there. Thank you so much for your time, Liam. Thank you and this has been a pleasure.
[00:59:52] Speaker B: Yeah, that's great, thanks.
