This is about your trading behavior, not your creation, sharing, judging, etc.
Investor:
You mainly focus on specific markets, and have large amount of mana (as a percent of your net worth) in them. Even if you have a few 10m bets here and there. You may check markets and liquidity, use limit orders, talk about specifics, make precise predictions, repeatedly buy/sell around your estimates, or pay a lot of attention to total lifetime profit (but you don't have to). Your main motivations may be some of: be known as a profitable trader, directly make large bets against people, or for certain positions, take serious risk, deeply research a specific domain. You might also enjoy competition against specific other people, or diligence, or proving yourself, taking risks, high pressure situations, etc.
Market Poll Voter:
You like to make many small investments in lots of markets. Your motivations may be: thinking about the future, testing your intuition, thinking about what your natural calibration graph looks like. You may like to bet on a market specifically for these reasons: 1) to get updates via price changes and comments, 2) to get a reminder in the future of if they were right 3) to test yourself, and advertise your intuition about a broad topic of interest.
Both:
Yes, there are people like this. For example, at one point I had 80% of my net worth in LK-99. But at the same time I had ~3000 small investments in other markets, so I'd consider myself still a "Market Poll Voter". If you're going to choose this, please really think about it and think about how you actually spend most of your trading time - is it looking at new markets and choosing a side? Or is it about reviewing your investments, or looking deeply at new, big markets and thinking about your exact predictions? Is it about reviewing, for the 10th or 100th time, your estimate of the proper price on a specific, large market? If you truly spend significant amounts of time in both, then you should pick Both. But if you really favor one side or the other, then please pick that!
If I have missed a type of trader, or overall motivation system, or just anything else, please let me know! I'd love to improve my accuracy in thinking about how people use manifold.
Here is the bottom of the 1st page of my portfolio, only showing OPEN markets, sorted by value, DESC
I have 150k mana cash, and the highest investment at the bottom of the page is down to 184. I have 34 pages of <184m investments after that. I am a classic "Market Poll Voter" with just a few markets where I have nearly any significant mana invested.
1,000I voted both. I'm an Investor in sports markets and a Market Poll Voter otherwise. When I have a big position in a market it's because it's a sport market, a limit order I wasn't expecting to fill up filled up, I'm arbitraging somehow with other markets or it's a /MartinRandall/will-ai-wipe-out-humanity-before-th-d8733b2114a8 type question.
I significantly invest, as in a few thousand mana each question, in a few topics I have priors in (games, some AI, ....), but largely I like spreading smaller bets around other topics: I went Market Poll Voter. I will say that I often can't get enough of a position in markets I want to, even for "smaller" bets, so I'm a pretty heavy limit order user, but I don't think that in itself disqualifies me.
@SemioticRivalry you have big investments... but you also have 30+ pages of small but >0 investments in open markets... You still spend most time researching/investing?
@Ernie I guess reading more closely I don't really fit in either category. I spend a negligible amount of time actually doing research, I just have very strong priors on most topics that are popular on Manifold. But I do try hard to profit maximize and pay much more attention to highly traded markets where it's easier to get real volume.
@Ernie I think communities would be a good idea, a bit like subreddits. So people who are here for sports have a place to hang out, people who are here for anime have a place to hang out, people who are here for AI have a place to hang out, etc. A bit like subreddits used to be. With custom CSS etc. would be pretty cool.
And custom flairs for within the specific community. So you can be identified as a LK-99 YES holder in the science community. Or a AGI doomer, or etc. Or a Trump supporter in US politics
@jim My dream is a nice "topic" page automatically generated for any niche topic on the site:
how many open markets are in the topic (with some validity filter)
how many of them you have a position in
chat for people who care about that topic
how many closed markets there are (and overall, were you right in them)
your overall rank in that topic, plus recent changes, leaderboards, etc.
you can pick topics and list them on your profile so people would see me as, say "Ernie (#Weiqi rank 3/192) (#Cybertruck rank 103/1020)"
This would help Market Poll Voters a ton. A similar mechanism w/tags/profile stuff could help Investors distinguish themselves too.
The point is to break down the too-big global status market into many small status markets so everyone has a chance to know more people and be involved in positive sum relationships with them.
Definitely both! I think there are a few other kinds of trader, like the casual trader who just makes a few bets without thinking too hard, but doesn't make enough of them to qualify as a market poll voter.