Mystified by anyone buying YES shares here... who's like... ah yes I have a dollar now, let me get a dollar and 6 cents in 2029.

that’s not completely mysterious, maybe people don’t have better / more certain options

But I am definitely interested in people betting no. Seems like they are paying for a better answer on the risk-free rate… in what world does this resolve no?

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Hmm, good point, obviously there’s no way you could possibly realize any pnl before resolution /s

@Ansel Your market as a measure of the risk-free rate only works if you have market participants who buy very large amounts of NO shares

Subsidy does that tho

Nope. Nobody is going to buy it back to 90% now

It would work if the subsidy was 100x bigger

This is not risk free. You could leave manifold or die. In that case returns are zero.

Possible, but I’m pretty sure a mod or AI would eventually resolve it. Regardless, that doesn’t seem to have affected the price much

You're better off betting against RFK losing the election, or in some other hugely subsidized market.

If I’m a below-average predictor of results, then my mana would have a net 0 expected value on other bets outside of this market. Then isn’t it 100% worth it for me to invest as much mana into this market as possible, no matter how low the interest rate is? In other words, is there really an opportunity cost associated with a 0 sum (or even negative ev) game like betting on manifold?

I think there is many better markets for getting interest free returns. I can send you a few, or sell info about some if you care about that. Manifold isn't 0-sum bc market creators provide liquidity upon market creation, making it something like a net 1000M profits per market, or something.

But assuming market creators bet on other markets, isn’t the overall experience still close to 0 sum return on investment?

Well, there is 250M per day manifold gives to every daily user; and when a market creator loses the 1000M it costs to create a market, they don't go down by 1000M in profits. So overall, if you sum all profit graphs, their sum goes up over time. If you sum all net worths over time, they also go up over time. People benefit from predictions, on top of raw profits or rate of returns, because those predictions are valuable. That seems like positive sum. if it isn't then I'm misunderstanding what you mean. I agree that when two people buy shares directly against one another (as the case in a limit order) the trade is zero-sum in future profit expectations to them, though

Oh I should have used a different term, but I’m considering the change in investable mana to be profit. In this sense, creating a market is now -1000 profit. Additionally, the 250 M per day is irrespective of the total amount of mana one has, so in this sense, the “risk free return rate” should be close to 0, as everyone should be incentivized to get any sort of guaranteed return whenever possible. Of course, the prevalence of other higher return free-mana markets contradicts this, but outside of these I think that any one of these markets is always worth.

https://manifold.markets/Soli/will-apples-ai-assistant-siri-stop?r=QmF5ZXNpYW4 this is close to 0%, because apple has announced that the new siri ai is coming in fall and this market is about it coming in the next 16 days (before fall)
https://manifold.markets/arbitrader/will-coinbase-be-the-next-crypto-pl?r=QmF5ZXNpYW4 This market is close to 0% because it resolves NO at the end of june unless coinbase is the "next crypto platform to face fraud/KYC charges" which I looked and am pretty sure they haven't.
I wouldn't buy these to 1% to be clear, maybe like 4% if I didn't care about interest rates
https://manifold.markets/getby/will-a-warning-label-regarding-pote?r=QmF5ZXNpYW4 this one's a similar story. One trick that might work is to look for markets by the Metaculus Bot, in Search, and move the manifold market closer to the probability on metaculus, which is oftentimes better than manifold. This doesn't always hold, so you should very rarely move markets by more than like 3% if you know yourself to make bad bets. A disclaimer: I hold shares in the markets ive linked, but i won't sell them if you buy some, that'd be a bit sus. alternatively look up the Free Mana tag, it'll have markets like this one that resolve in less years than this one. Generally the markets that give you similar returns over shorter timespans are much better

Well, if there's like 50 million mana in the economy, and 1000 people get 250M mana everyday (idk what the exact numbers are but they are probably within an order of magnitude), then 250,000M is printed everyday, on top of mana people buy. that's like 0.5% increase in economy size per day, which is pretty significant. I may be doing some of the math on that wrong bc that sounds absurd

https://manifold.markets/VictorLevoso/how-many-total-votes-will-our-mechi these options should all add up to 100%! and 0-10 and 10-20 aren't possible since it's at 21 votes last i checked. unless people can cancel votes. So i wouldn't literally buy 10-20 to 0% but i would for 0-10

paper profits ❤