86% Return? How to Use a Bot to 'Earn Passively' on Polymarket
This article details the development and backtesting of an automated trading bot for the "BTC 15-minute UP/DOWN" market on Polymarket. The author identified market inefficiencies and automated a manual strategy to exploit them.
The bot operates in two modes. In manual mode, users can directly place orders. In auto mode, it runs a two-leg cycle: First, it observes the market for a set time after a round begins. If either the "UP" or "DOWN" side drops by a specified percentage (e.g., 15%) within seconds, it triggers "Leg 1" and buys the crashed side. It then waits for "Leg 2," a hedging trade on the opposite side, which is only executed if the sum of the Leg 1 entry price and the opposite ask price meets a target threshold (e.g., ≤ 0.95).
Due to a lack of historical market data from Polymarket's API, the author created a custom backtesting system by recording 6 GB of live price snapshots over four days. A conservative backtest with parameters of a 15% crash threshold and a 0.95 sum target showed an 86% ROI, turning $1,000 into $1,869. An aggressive parameter set resulted in a -50% loss, highlighting the critical role of parameter selection.
The author acknowledges significant limitations of the backtesting, including its short data period, failure to model order book depth, partial fills, variable network latency, and the market impact of the bot's own orders. Future improvements include rewriting the bot in Rust for performance, running a dedicated node, and deploying on a low-latency VPS.
marsbit12/30 04:07
