🏅 Top traders

Alright, we have 6 awesome submissions to the trading bot competition!

The bots ordered by their profit in the past week is as follows:

• Velocity: M$13,510

• Michael’s Bot Laboratory: M$4,433

• JuniorBot: M$76

• Arbitrage Bot: M$61

• runebot: M$54

• Liquidity Bonus bot: M$0

All of the bots were profitable, except for Liquidity Bonus Bot which didn't run this last week.

• Velocity did by far the best, but is disqualified for not posting their source code. It seems to bet in the same direction as the last bettor, exploiting the fact that human bettors don't bet enough when they know something. It may have other strategies as well.

  • No source code posted.

• Michael's Bot Laboratory had multiple strategies, including adjusting down markets as time passes on questions with a single resolving event, betting against large miscalibrated bets typically from new users, and antagonizing the Velocity bot.

  • https://github.com/mwhea/Manifold_Trading_Bots

• JuniorBot bets into the extreme probabilities, assuming that most traders would prefer not to lock up their capital just to move the price from 97% to 99%.

  • https://github.com/journcy/manifold-juniorbot

• Arbitrage Bot trades within groups of related markets, keeping the probabilities consistent.

  • https://github.com/diomidov/manibots/tree/main/arbitrage-bot

• runebot uses machine learning to predict market resolutions based on trade history. It was trained on all the trades made on Manifold so far!

  • https://github.com/PlumpkinPaws/Manifold_Machine_Learning

• Liquidity Bonus Bot was a short-lived but profitable attempt to exploit how Manifold was injecting free liquidity in to markets based on the number of unique traders. Because of this bot, Manifold stopped injected free liquidity.

  • https://gist.github.com/diomidov/0f5c97ee44c6f8e455544d141793481e

And now... let's announce the prizes! We have M$100,000 to give out.

• Michael's Bot Laboratory - M$40,000

• runebot - M$25,000

• JuniorBot - M$15,000

• Arbitrage Bot - M$15,000

• Liquidity Bonus Bot - M$5,000

Congratulations to all the winners! I'll be messaging you shortly with a Manalink to your winnings, which you can gain to any Manifold account.

Thanks for your participation! Bots can do a lot to make our markets more efficient and accurate. They are already making an impact, and I know they will only become more important over time.

I hope that anyone who has ambitions for writing their own bot will be able to get started more quickly by reading and/or copying code from the above bots. In that way, these entrants have blazed a trail in service to the Manifold community.

Cheers,

James

@JamesGrugett I emailed @runebot and @JuniorBot with their winnings. Let me know if you didn't get the email!

I know I'm late, but I hope I can still get the 5K bonus.
https://github.com/diomidov/manibots/tree/main/arbitrage-bot

Thanks for all the bot submissions! They look pretty cool!

Submissions are now closed. The bots will be judged this Friday (Sept 30th). I'll look forward to seeing how the bots perform this week!

My wife volunteered to do machine learning on the manifold API outputs. I've been busy with my own submission so it's a work in progress: https://github.com/PlumpkinPaws/Manifold_Machine_Learning

@JuniorBot This bot is designed to make small but hopefully consistent returns off of market probabilities at the tails--basically, betting that (e.g.) a market that is soon to resolve and at 5% is actually more than 95% likely to resolve NO, and this isn't priced in by the market because users don't want to tie up their capital.

https://github.com/journcy/manifold-juniorbot

@ArbitrageBot This bot is supposed to arbitrage groups of manually selected markets. Unfortunately it has quite a few critical issues I'd have to fix before I fully deploy it, and I probably won't have time for that before the deadline.

@JamesGrugett https://gist.github.com/diomidov/0f5c97ee44c6f8e455544d141793481e

@Yev Haha. If you post your code here (github link), you're still eligible for a prize~

@JamesGrugett Yeah, that's one of the reasons I shut it down. Not much use running it after you turned the bonus off :)

@Botlab I've added a second strategy which places bets to counteract large price movements, if the bettor seems likely to be a troll account or a new user.

@LiquidityBonusBot Thank you! We noticed the exploit (based on an injection of free liquidity per unique trader) and turned it off before you scaled up the bot too much haha.

@LiquidityBonusBot I'm shutting down this bot and I've reinvested the mana back into the markets it has exploited.

@SneakySly Thanks for your vote of confidence. Now, if you'd like to help me win, one thing you could do is insider trade on https://manifold.markets/SneakySly/will-manifold-improve-the-home-page. The bot moving the price 33% on a subjective question is making me nervous.

I like the idea of running multiple trading strategies from a single bot/account. I've got one strategy up and running, but as I add more modules, do you want me to add additional comments describing the added strategies, to make sure they also get approved?

@Botlab Awesome, thanks for entering the competition!

I think you won't be required to post additional comments after bot changes, but I'd love hear about those new strategies here, if you feel like sharing.

@Botlab Just added M$5000 to the bot's balance. Congrats on being the first submission!

@JamesGrugett And thanks for setting up James' Bot. The code provided a lot of useful guidance.

@Botlab This bot monitors a list of markets of the form "Will event happen by date?" and after periods of inactivity, it adjusts the probability downward to reflect the fact that the event still hasn't happened.

https://github.com/mwhea/Manifold_Trading_Bots

What's the thinking behind open sourcing the bots' code during the competition's run? A lot of trading strategies I'm coming up with are vulnerable to exploitation by any third parties privy to their exact decisionmaking algorithm.

@MichaelWheatley That's a good point! However, I wanted to get a lot of code out in public for others to build off of.

You could try implementing it anyway to see if anyone follows through on exploiting it. We might give you extra credit if it makes lots of profit before another bot shuts it down :-)

on the amount of profit it earns (primarily in the last week of the competition)

What is counted as profit? For example, what about bot operating on long-term markets?

Is bot allowed to comment on their transactions?

@M "what about bot operating on long-term markets, which opened position which are not yet closed"

Is profit in this case the same thing as displayed on the profile screen?

@M Profit includes the investment value which tracks the current market probability for bets (even without resolution). This is the same as what's shown on the profile page.
It's true that bots designed to make profit over a longer term will have a disadvantage.

I don't see why we'd prevent bots from commenting.

Would it be OK to publish it on other site such as Codeberg? My Github account is strongly connected to my real name and in general I would prefer it to not be linked.

And Github forbids multiple accouns being used by one person.

@M Sure! As long as anyone can read the source code.