Genius Sports announced the launch of a new prediction market comparison site on Thursday. One of its features is to track where the “smart money” is going. But what it reveals is that the “smart money” is actually trading bots that buy and sell positions rather than predicting outcomes.
The new platform has a page dedicated to watching the flow of “smart money”.
“Use our free smart money tracker to follow real-time prediction market trades from the Polymarket leaderboard,” the page declares. “See the most profitable wallets from Polymarket whales, with smart money signals ranked by lifetime P&L, trading history, trade size and price on every fill.”
Volume Figures Vastly Over-Inflated By Bot Trades
It is not clear who is behind the trgparking account, but it is just one example of many automated trading accounts that dominate prediction markets. In total, the account has traded $18.5 million since joining Polymarket in April.
Trading volume is often cited as evidence of the explosive rise in prediction markets, but it is not to be confused with sportsbook handle. For a detailed breakdown on the difference, see our analysis of trading on the World Cup.
Also rarely reported is how much of the trading volume is bot-driven. With frequent live events, esports is particularly targeted by bots.
In fact, it was the most-traded sport on Polymarket’s international platform in August, with $1.32 billion in trading volume, according to Ollie Ring on Substack.
Over $181 million was traded on the Dota 2 event, The International. In total, 21,936 accounts traded on the event; of these, 2,193 accounted for around $178 million (97.8%).
The largest 220 accounts, almost exactly the top 1%, accounted for 72.8% of the volume, according to analysis by Predictbook. These are all, almost certainly, bots.
