🏅 Top traders

My takeaway here is that while there were some large profits due to these big price swings (in the ballpark of M500 or so), after a month in the tournament, the top traders on the leaderboard have consistently been making much larger profits from what you might call normal good predicting and trading.

And note that the tournament did remove first-day profits from counting towards the leaderboard, and added large AMM liquidity to reduce major price swings.

So overall, I think the big price swings issue has been fairly well addressed and I don't think it will cause the tournament results to be completely wrong.

@1941159478 you're the top trader today 8/31, would you be able to check whether this is true or not? Profits and bet history were made private so I can't check myself.

@1941159478 (don't know why the previous one didn't turn into an @ mention)

@1941159478 In the bet history of https://salemcenter.manifold.markets/SalemCenter/chinese-military-action-against-tai, it looks like on the first day you bought S$6 NO with a limit order at 99%, which would be roughly 600 shares (could range from 550-650 because of rounding). The market price now is 21%, and you sold many shares at around that price, so the profit resulting from that buy was roughly 600 * (.99 - .21) = 468. It looks like that was the only big mispriced trade you made on that market. Let me know if this is accurate.

Is that greater or less than half of your total profits?

@jack He looks to have >600 in profits from the resolution here: https://salemcenter.manifold.markets/SalemCenter/biden-cancel-student-debt-in-2022

Also, Salem wiped the formal profit counts after day one to counteract the big yields trading against newbies. I don't know if you would count profits which don't count towards the official profit number for this market.

@MichaelWheatley Thanks, in that case this resolves NO if I haven't missed something.

Yeah, wiping the first day of profits from the leaderboard makes things a bit messy here, but I believe including the first day of profits is the best fit for the market description here. Since the big mispricing trade on the Taiwan market was on the first day, it wouldn't make sense to compare that to a total profit number that didn't include the first day.

The main question now is whether there's any other market that they traded on that meets the criteria of it went to <1% or >99% and then you bought a bunch of cheap shares and made >1000 profits (since it would have to exceed the ~468 and the 687 already identified). I don't think so, and so far I didn't see any.

@jack The Taiwan market is indeed the only one where I bought or sold something at 1% or 99%. I guess since the profits are supposed to be hidden I can’t just post a screenshot of my profile page. But the profit from that trade is less than half the total profits, even excluding the first day. So this should resolve NO.

I insider traded on this market, so there’s an uncomfortable conflict of interest here. Pinky promise though!

@1941159478 Thank you! I think we have collectively done sufficient due diligence that I am confident in the NO resolution.

Because viewing other people's bets was disabled, I no longer have the ability to resolve this market myself. If someone with the ability to see the top trader's bets (either an admin or the trader themselves) is willing to determine the resolution within the next few days, I'll go by that - let me know if so. Otherwise I'll resolve N/A.

Oh, it might still possible by trawling through the bet history on each individual market, or through the API. Note that we'd also need to calculate their total profits since that's now hidden from the leaderboard. I'm very unlikely to do this myself, but if anyone wants to volunteer to help resolve this market, let me know.

Yes to the title question, No to the resolution criteria (requiring the price to be <1% or >99%).

The organizers injected a ton of liquidity into every market, so now I think extreme price slippage is unlikely to happen anymore, at least to the same degree as before. Before, I observed a couple instances of <1% and >99%, and now maybe we'd see something like 70% to 30%, which could still create a large profit opportunity but probably not enough to put one on the leaderboard alone.