Market Update for Week 2021-10-17

Published: 2021-10-23

This is the first market update on prediction market. I'll try to post these periodically. Please let me know if you find these useful by emailing me.

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All of the round data referenced below can be downloaded from here. The data is part of a project that downloads round data periodically and uploads the csv. In future posts, I'll go into how to analyze round data and back-test your strategy.

Paused markets


After a long streak of unbroken prediction games, we got our first stoppage last Wednesday (2021-10-20) although the stoppage was only for around 4 hours. The last stoppage before then was 2021-09-28. The stoppage was apparently due to The Graph lagging. Pancake swap introduced their own dedicated node on October 13th but they still rely on The Graph to fetch a user's bet history and other things.

Note that I am unaffiliated with Pancake Swap and this is all speculation. But hey, if PS wants to reach out, you know how to reach me ;-)



Recent action


Predictions saw good traffic this week especially on Thursday following the stoppage, but it has come down considerably since then. Below is 24 hour rolling average pool size. The red vertical line represents the stoppage on 2021-10-20.

prediction contract

Here's the chart since the game started

prediction contract



In the last few weeks we've seen a spike in traffic leading up to the end of a week and a subsequent fall. In general, you want to play when others are playing because that means a deeper market so your bets move the market less.

For instance, assume you have equal bull and bear bets and you bet 0.1. If the market was 20 BNB, the payout (ignoring treasury fee) would drop by 0.0099 or ~$4.65. But if the pool size were double (40 BNB), your payoff would drop half that amount. So when you see a big pool size, take advantage.

Speaking of big pool sizes, the 5 biggest pool sizes were towards the end of the week

epoch start size bull bear winner
1516221-10-21 17:21120.0447.0473.00bear
1537621-10-22 11:45122.8478.1144.72bear
1510821-10-21 12:43123.9554.5569.39bull
1517121-10-21 18:08126.4375.6050.82bull
1482321-10-20 12:14128.0163.2564.75bull



Whale hunting


Usually when you see a big round its because a whale entered the round and skewed the numbers favorably in one direction. For instance, if the round size is 20 with even odds (2x), a bet of 20 would move the odds to 3x. So even if you don't think that result is unlikely, it makes sense to bet since the odds are very good. Of course this is assuming the whale doesn't have a way to manipulate the market in his favor, in which case you should copy the whale's bet.

This is exactly what happened, with account 0xc8923536f8c1a348f15e87315740bb5933aeb4c9 dropping 45.5449 BNB into round 14823. People noticed and jumped in to even the odds, however fortunately for 0xc89, he won and came away with a win size of 43.8605 or around $21,000.



But don't be too jealous, he lost a lot more in the run up to that bet and in the last 1,000 games he played, he's down 220 BNB or ~$105k. That's the problem with very large bets, you move the market against you and a winning strategy can turn unfavorable very quickly.



prediction contract



As a side note, a hidden feature in BSC Predict, is the ability to see the last 1,000 games of any player just by going to the History page, and putting in the address of the user under Account.



That's it for this week, but I look forward to another exciting week in BSC Prediction Markets. Feel free to reach out with questions or comments. If you like what you read and want to subscribe to receive an email when a new post is published, click here.

I tip my fedora to the Pancake Swap team for keeping the game up and running for so long. Good luck and bet responsibly!