If you know anything about my betting strategy, I pride myself on never taking any loans. Since they eliminated automatic loans, I’ve only pushed the loan button twice, both times accidentally, and since it moved to the new personal profile page, I haven’t touched it once.
At the same time, I’ve been quite cash strapped in the last week+, and hit a 0M balance this morning. With the new higher market costs, making this market will deplete >⅔ of my current balance.
Will I take a loan of any kind in the next two weeks (by March 9th)? This includes borrowing even a single Mana from any user or pushing the loan button. The loan needs to be both requested and granted, don’t send me 1M and say “Resolves YES”.
As I’m fully in the driver’s seat here, I won’t be betting.
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@bohaska matty would never sell his self-respect for 10 mana! besides, looks like he can make 1700M profits from this market alone LOL. it's sheer fucking will that's keeping him going at this point
@Bayesian @bohaska @shankypanky not quite. i could take a 10k loan (ammon offered interest-free), and put in on this market, but I’d only make 1.3k. Or about $13. That can’t buy you lunch in SF, I’m not losing a friend for that :)
@mattyb a heartwarming tale of a relationship threatened by the unsavoury plotting of outsiders, and how an unlikely hero - inflation - emerged to keep two people together
@shankypanky you got at least another decade’s worth of inflation before it’ll be a real choice 💙
@AmmonLam amazingly, you’re not the first person to offer me that. i’ll say no for now, as I’ve got no place to spend it.
i will consider this in the future though!
Wow that's crazy! I actually didn't realize 'no loans' applied to the daily loans as well. Super impressive that you pull it off.
to be prolific in markets with resolution more than a few months out (e.g. UK gen election), it seems like daily loans would be basically required? but of course I would have said the same thing before, & somehow you've made it work, so who knows =).
(personally I find daily loans make manifold much more fun, with no downside, but we all find joy in different challenges, so no clue if abandoning your "no loan" principle would make manifold more/less fun. tbh even with daily loans i'm often liquidity constrained, but at least they let me treat "reprice the oscar markets" as a daily game without worrying too much about what i can afford)
to be prolific in markets with resolution more than a few months out (e.g. UK gen election), it seems like daily loans would be basically required? but of course I would have said the same thing before, & somehow you've made it work, so who knows =).
The trick is new money comes in, and unwedges me, and then I can sell. I love when people unwedge me!
I mean, clearly it’s hit a bit of dry land. I should have 2k coming in from a market resolving tonight, then it’s unclear what’s next…
@Fion yea, sorry this took a sec. I really felt this deserved a full answer and this has been a busy chore day so far.
I don’t think it’s cheating, it really just doesn’t make sense for the game I’m play, in my eyes. I’m proud that it’s still going mostly.
Full text for why I don’t take each:
Daily, market-leveraged
I place a lot of bets with limit orders warning me if the price of something goes down. This is because I only feel confident losing that tiny quotient of my investment before I’d like to be presented with the choice of “should I sell this? (and then should i flip?), do i hold it, or is it best to buy back the loss?” If you really do this obsessively, you can (theoretically, I’m still off by 0.01) have a perfect calibration, which is kinda my goal right now.
When I push the daily loan button, effectively, I’m raising the confidence in my bets, and saying that I know that all of these will eventually Resolve in the direction that I’m holding. However, my limits don’t move to reflect this, which means that I can lose more money within each market before I’m notified. I don’t love those logistics, and would rather go through my investments and sell things which are sitting at 0.1% and have almost no Mana-earning potential left. It’s tedious, but I think my best method for regaining liquidity.
My perfect system would move my limits accordingly when they take a loan, and trip the limit (or better, don’t take a loan at all) from markets with limits close to the market price. It’s still a bit opaque how the auto-leverage loans work, so this could be baked in already and I could be afraid of a paper tiger 🤷🏻‍♂️.
Person-to-person
I did take one of these once! I borrowed 400M from Joshua (iirc) for 24hrs, and returned like 440M (maybe?). At that point in time, I had 0 liquidity and was only worth like 8-9k in total, so it was a decent size loan for me. I saw a number of mis-priced markets, which were about to Resolve for an award show, or something.
I would take another person-to-person loan if I had a similar situation, but honestly, I hate having to share the profits with other people for my work. I’m worth 80k at this point, I feel fairly confident I can salvage some of my own nearly paid-out bets to get some capital, which is a better ROI than seeking out an external party to get money with interest.
I would have to see something fairly significant, or want to do something quite ballsy to get a loan, and it would likely be 10k or higher. I’m not saying it won’t happen, but it hasn’t yet.
@shankypanky ugh idk. it depends why i’m taking the loan. if i just have nothing obvious left to sell (what’s keeping me afloat now), I may take a daily loan just to keep me afloat.
If there’s something I see that I’d like to use more of my whale-powers to buy/move, I’d probably take a 10k loan.
Either way, I’m trading like a minnow again now.
@shankypanky oh, and I have no idea about making markets. I definitely can’t make a multi anymore.