Original Lesswrong thread here.
Original tweet here:
Unlinked market with shorter timeframes here: /Joshua/when-will-we-know-that-any-past-ufo
Related questions
I assume you have some misconceptions based on seeing me trade on two accounts and immediately assuming that is suspicious.
Just to clarify what I'm doing here: I can't sell my YES (aka buy NO) without giving up most of the associated loans I already got on that YES. So because I predict there will be a short-term downward price movement, I buy NO on my alt (which is clearly labelled with my name so everyone knows it's me), wait for the price to drop, and then sell that NO (while I continue holding all my long-term YES shares here). Simple trade and I see no problems with it - we've specifically checked about whether these sorts of things are both allowed by the rules and considered appropriate, and the answer was yes.
@jack Interesting. I was considering that trade as well, but it didn't occur to me that alts are allowed.
It seems pretty dopey that the mechanics of the site encourage someone to pass mana back and forth between their main account and "PeRsOnAl mArKeTs accounts" to run a separate trading strategy, with different time horizons, on the exact same markets (in which they're also the single largest bettor), but ok. I guess you're just "manually correcting" for the inability of a typical user to be able to hold two simultaneous positions that reflect two different probability theses over two different time frames, which is a feature that maybe ought to exist?
The real question this provoked for me is, if alt accounts are allowed, and they're allowed to trade on the same markets as the main accounts, mana transfers between them are allowed, and loans exist (for now), then taken to the extreme, why should anyone ever take losses on a position, particularly in the event a long-term market resolves unfavorably? Seemingly the same logic would just allow you to concentrate a negative balance into one account, and a positive balance into the other one.
@ChrisMills yes, that is one of the many ways in which loans printed mana, which is why they are going away on their current form.
@ChrisMills This in no way removes any losses. I am still taking (paper) losses on my (long term) yes shares whenever the price goes down (and also paper gains when they go up). It changes only my cash balances (by keeping more loans active - that's the whole point), not profits.
And my total profit is the same - all I am doing is subdividing my portfolio on this market into a short and long term segment, to optimize the usage of the manifold loans.
The key point is that you are allowed to move mana (i.e. moving cash balances between your accounts) and implement different trading strategies, but you are not allowed to move positions and manipulate profits - from the rules, these are not allowed:
Holding positions which are then traded off to another account
Making trades with multiple accounts on the same market to manipulate the price/odds an account can buy in for.
Any other action that could benefit the profit of an account that involves a second intentionally “losing”.
You can see that I cancelled all my open orders on this account so I'm not trading at the same time on both accounts - I simply bought NO on the alt, and am now selling that NO.
So, the scenario you describe of moving all your losses to one account - that is totally different and definitely against the rules
@ChrisMills and also, I don't know why you're making fun of my "personal markets account". I used it like a second channel on YouTube for market creation - you can see the markets I make there are totally different from the ones on here, exactly as described. I also used it for secondary trades when I basically needed to manually implement a form of portfolio subdivision because manifold doesn't have that feature. In particular, being able to optimize loans, allocate a budget for my limit orders, things like that.
Edit: I realized it perhaps could have been misinterpreted as "for trading on personal markets..." rather than "for creating personal markets" which is obviously what I meant. I updated the bio for that.
I guess you're just "manually correcting" for the inability of a typical user to be able to hold two simultaneous positions that reflect two different probability theses over two different time frames, which is a feature that maybe ought to exist?
Yes, in my opinion the issue here is primarily with loan mechanics - they had some problems that I and many others have noted. I've suggested that when you sell part of a position and rebuy part of it, you should get the same loan ratio on any shares that you previously held instead of starting back from 0 loans. The currently loan system discourages a mix of frequent trading and long-term holding, and using that fix seems pretty obvious. Anyway, loans are being removed entirely, so this won't matter anymore.
Great, I just sold all my NO, and all of that was for a grand total of 300 profit (average 3% margin on the 10k shares I was able to pick up at good prices). Why did I bother. (Answer: I guess I was hoping to pick up a lot more shares than that, but it's just funny it turned out to be so little.)
@jack
> I realized it perhaps could have been misinterpreted as "for trading on personal markets..." rather than "for creating personal markets" which is obviously what I meant. I updated the bio for that.
Yeah, that the was the initial interpretation I took.
I only discovered this was happening because I'll occasionally "manually check" the order book depth, and I was wondering who the heck was buying thousands of mana of limit YES at 91, after a few people had variously declared it not worth it to do that for long-term markets anymore, but I guess this was effectively a limit sell of NO?
The reason I even check is that that has been a historical annoyance for me, because in the past, when I dug into some of these limit walls, I often found they weren't "real", in the sense that someone had placed limits that seemingly vastly exceeded their currently available balance. I suppose Manifold just naively checks the book, with the assumption that all existing limit orders can be filled (on the basis that the mana was there when the limit order was made), otherwise it might generate too many DB queries and latency about resultant probability every time someone idly types a number in.
Seemingly that allows anyone to stuff the order book full of phantom limit orders, which would obviously evaporate if you tried to trade into them, but leave the impression the book has much more depth in a particular direction than it actually does (which I often thought was the case on this market, though I don't doubt whales would have scrounged up the mana to buy YES at 65 or whatever, had someone actually pushed it there, if only to sell it back at 95 again).
> This in no way removes any losses. I am still taking (paper) losses on my (long term) yes shares whenever the price goes down (and also paper gains when they go up).
Yeah, I understand that's not what you're doing, at this moment. Separately, are we still taking paper losses and profits on this market? My paper profits (or losses, such as the case may be) on this market do not seem to factor into Leagues at all anymore, since a few months ago.
> So, the scenario you describe of moving all your losses to one account - that is totally different and definitely against the rules
...is it, though? I am simply "pursuing a trading strategy in my alt account", it just so happens that it leaves me unable to repay the outstanding loan balance on my original account, how regrettable!
Edit: What the hell is our Markdown for quotes?
past UFO sightings? That's very very weird phrasing. Why constrain it to past? I'd be willing to bet 1000 to 1 odds that if we find 'worldview shattering' sightings in the next 5 years, then we've had 'worldview shattering' in the past, recent or otherwise. No idea how to resolve such a thing, but certainly one implies the other.
@gpt_news_headlines That said, the 150 to 1 odds on this bet seems fairly safe given that everytime this issue comes up (which is a lot) it's quickly and very repeatedly dismissed. Simple bayesian analysis says that he's probably safe for another 5 years.
@gpt_news_headlines "past" because Yudkowsky puts non-zero chance on the next five years having lots of AI-related weirdness.
@gpt_news_headlines And there’s the convenient “explanation” already queued up - if anything weird happens, it’s definitely AI and not actual aliens
@Ansel i like roon's tweet .. it's already an alien intelligence. good enough for me. aliens are already on our planet
@jacksonpolack I don’t know how we resolve the bet, but I’m happy to just chat about the hypotheses, priors etc
@Irigi Yeah, when I learned about loans ending I stopped all my limit orders on such matters and I won't be buying further at these prices. If I have to hold for 5 years, I deserve the interest rate at minimum, and this isn't it. But I didn't liquidate because I've already got a lot of loans.
@MartinRandall Yeah, this how it works on Poly as well. Whales know about the min price cause by risk free rates / deposit risk and profit from it.