PPX update

I’ve been playing the PopSci Predictions Exchange since writing about it a few months ago. I only have time to visit a couple of times a week so I’m no day trader (and the site is so slow, day trading would be a royal pain). I find myself doing quite well regardless. My goal is to break, and stay inside, the top 1000 traders. I’m currently sitting just outside at around 1050. There are some 20,000 trader accounts so this puts me in the top 5%. No doubt many accounts are quickly abandoned so a percentile ranking increases naturally just by holding money in the bank, hence my goal is an absolute ranked position. To maintain that I’ll need to continually improve.

There’s a clear power-law distribution of trading success. Relatively few traders do very well, and there are large gaps between the top players. Then as you move further down the rankings more and more traders have similar balances and any given difference in rankings is marked by a smaller difference in balance.

I’ve only recently discovered techniques for getting my virtual dollars to work harder. I was initially disappointed that their market prevented huge risk/reward profiles otherwise possible by shorting unlimited stocks and using this “borrowed” money to go long. Instead, money is taken from your account equivalent to the short stock’s value, and repaid when you cover. But I have now realised that if a short stock falls a fair way you can cover the bet, recovering capital, then short again at approximately the same price but with a far lower capital outlay. This leaves a bunch of your money free to invest in other stocks but, apart from a small commission on trades, doesn’t affect your total profit from the shorted stock when you eventually cash out.

Given this fairly recent discovery, I’m confident I can crack the top 1000 without devoting too much more time to trading. I would really like to find a real-money technology prediction market, trading against other punters. Even given the number of traders who probably don’t take PPX too seriously, my performance is probably an indicator I’d do quite well out of it. Unfortunately all the for-profit markets I can find are political, sporting, weather etc. Maybe I should start my own.

Update: I cleared the top 1000 since this post. I’m now in the 800s.