Best Markets and Strategies on Polymarket
The most active markets on Polymarket are sports, politics, and cryptocurrency, with the 5-minute Bitcoin Up or Down market being especially popular. Consistent profits usually come from automated arbitrage bots that exploit pricing differences across platforms like Kalshi and Metaculus, or from research-heavy traders who find unpriced information. Manual traders face difficulties because markets are mostly efficient, fees eat into edges, and bots dominate the top trader leaderboards. Making money manually is tough, as 14 out of the 20 top traders are bots executing high-frequency strategies.
How to Profit on Polymarket: Strategies and Efficiency
Polymarket is highly efficient, making it hard for individual traders to find a consistent edge. Prices are well calibrated, meaning stated probabilities generally match actual outcomes, especially near resolution. The most consistent profits come from arbitrage bots that exploit pricing differences across multiple platforms. Other successful methods include deep research on niche mid-tail markets and exploiting micro-structures like flipping 1 cent shares to 2 cents. Traders face high transaction costs that can require a 51.8% win rate just to break even, a lack of historical order book data, and severe customer support backlogs.