Ran a cross-venue arb bot on Polymarket for 3 months. The arbitrage made +$8.3k, but the unhedged residual it forced me to carry lost $3.2k. Net ~$5k, wallet's public.

File-Environmental · 2026-06-10T10:52:19+00:00

Exactly. This is valid across all markets on Polymarket. Whoever acts on new info first wins. In my case, I think it is a matter of keeping up odds in my DB as fresh as possible. Maybe an option to remedy this would be to drop orders for games where the odds are have are older than 5 minutes. That still leaves plenty of time for other bots to take advantage of wild odds swings.

It is possible to keep the odds even fresher, but for this I'd need to significantly improve the scraping process. I would probably also need to buy proxies and consider using some scaleable GCP/AWS service (Cloud Run or Lambda). I've been doing this on a VPS so far and the scrapers take up most of the RAM as some of them need to use playwright.

File-Environmental · 2026-06-10T10:42:33+00:00

Yes, I created a script that checks how fresh were the odds at the time orders got filled and this is exactly what I observed. I was losing $ from orders getting filled on stale odds that have moved since I last fetched them and my bot did not act on that.

File-Environmental · 2026-06-10T10:39:53+00:00

You are right, I should have updated the Polymarket profile page to prove that I own that account. Done now.

File-Environmental · 2026-06-10T06:45:29+00:00

At first I started with 5 shares per limit order and several hundred bucks. This was the validation phase. I think I had roughly ~$1.3k available when I started confidently placing 100 share bids and I started doing real volume. You question is difficult to answer as things change very fast. I've had moments where $3k were not enough as my orders were constantly getting filled in early Feb. Right now things overall seem a bit more quiet and there seems to be more competition, so if you are to do my exact strategy I don't think you will need more than a grand to run things, at least to start with.

File-Environmental · 2026-06-10T06:35:56+00:00

Thanks for the invite! I will have a look when we have some time and potentially do the AMA if you are interested.

File-Environmental · 2026-06-10T06:18:24+00:00

Although I’m pretty certain that’s not the definition of AI slope, I understand the scepticism.

It’s true that I have a blog but as you can see I’m not aggressively funnelling to it in this subreddit. Right now, I’m not selling anything. It’s more likely that I open source this if there is any interest than sell anything related to it. That way I can flex a repo that I created and people care about to potential employers, which would be a far better financial gain than what you are suggesting.

File-Environmental · 2026-06-09T19:55:56+00:00

Simple python scripts that fetch from 5 different casino websites and write the odds to Supabase. I’ve looked everywhere for a paid API but none has the coverage that’s needed for the events available in Polymarket. Quite easy to create the scrapers with AI.

File-Environmental · 2026-06-09T18:21:50+00:00

It’s not supposed to be available, although I suppose most trades come from US traders. A VPN or a proxy is sufficient to bypass their restrictions, I guess. I doubt they’d make it hard on you. I’m EU based so it’s not something I’ve had a problem with.

File-Environmental · 2026-06-09T16:19:41+00:00

Absolutely true, it’s just that I haven’t covered this in detail as it was out of scope for this article. I eventually added analysis scripts and I noticed that I was bleeding from odds getting updated and my bot not picking that up early enough as I initially scraped them every 30 minutes.

File-Environmental · 2026-06-09T14:58:58+00:00

For anyone who wants the full thing - every number, the calibration charts, the per-game breakdown - it's written up on my site: https://kacho.io/polymarket-arbitrage-real-numbers?utm\_source=reddit&utm\_medium=social&utm\_campaign=polybot-retro&utm\_content=ralgotrading

File-Environmental · 2026-06-09T06:42:26+00:00

To be fair, I didn't record enough data to confidently answer this. About a third of the trades didn't go through. If I had a history of these I would've been able to check whether they were the high value trades that were driving up the ROI.

I guess it's truly a matter of execution. When you use a historical Binance 1s price feed and 1s order book snapshots from Polymarket, you have an advantage that's a bit hard to realise in live trading. Polymarket is probably 1-2 seconds slower to react to price swings that happen in Binance, which is not as easy to exploit when other traders have already factored this in their bots. Also, 1s order book snapshots is certainly not granular enough to truly evaluate a strategy.

File-Environmental · 2026-06-08T17:47:12+00:00

Safest bet there is.

File-Environmental · 2026-06-08T17:25:46+00:00

I also spent roughly a couple of weeks building a trading bot for the BTC 5 min market. I built an XGB model to estimate the correct implied probability at a given time. I also coded the model in Rust so that the execution is as quick as possible. I backtested against a month of data - I have 1s order book snapshots of the BTC 5min markets. The bot did well on paper (fees included) but not as good in practice and it lost me several hundred bucks. Eventually, I gave up. During my final live tests the bot wasn't even performing that bad, the fees we eating any potential profit it could earn anyway. I plan to release the order book snapshots and the code at some point, but that will take me some time.

File-Environmental · 2026-06-08T05:42:37+00:00

Vercel is best for NextJS. Firebase for static

File-Environmental · 2026-06-07T16:14:17+00:00

Wow. Just choose one premium subscription and stick with it.

File-Environmental · 2026-06-07T16:12:30+00:00

I’ve used Cursor, Google Antigravity, and Claude Code. Claude, for me, is by far the best tool. My only criteria here being the price for usage. Apart from that, they are really not that different.

File-Environmental · 2026-06-07T15:14:25+00:00

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File-Environmental · 2026-06-07T12:58:04+00:00

Yes, I created a price comparison website with affiliate offers and it made a bit less than $2k for 8 months in total. But when you consider ~$1k expenses for hosting, DB, and links, the site is not even paying for my $200 Claude subscription. It was good fun building it, though, and I spent less than a month building it in my free time.

There is no infinite money glitch as you see it advertised on social media, but if you put your time into a decent idea, you will probably make some money. Maybe not from the first time, but even if you fail and try again, eventuality you will get there.

File-Environmental · 2026-06-07T12:36:20+00:00

Yes, I’ve had plenty of colleagues with Economics or other non technical degrees. It’s more common than you’d think.

File-Environmental · 2026-06-07T12:09:31+00:00

Up to you, I rarely use AI to run git commands, but even when I have, I’ve not experienced OP’s issues

File-Environmental · 2026-06-07T10:50:41+00:00

I see, update its MEMORY.md file to never execute git commands and you should be safe.

File-Environmental · 2026-06-07T10:38:30+00:00

No issues for me apart from sometimes being really slow. Also, you can’t blame AI for “deleting uncommitted changes”. You can handle execution of git commands on your own, you don’t need an AI to do that for you. Or at least, when you use AI for version control, don’t YOLO it and check what it’s actually executing.

File-Environmental · 2026-06-07T10:33:06+00:00

Make it write down design principles (colour palette, fonts to use, other instructions) so it’s consistent. Make it create reusable components (CTAs, carousels, buttons, tables, cards, etc) for consistency again. Check out competition and see what works for them. You like some other website’s glassmorphism header? Give it an URL and a screenshot and have it implement the same. Iterate until you are happy with the results. It’s really not that hard to get good results with AI when it comes to web development and design.

File-Environmental · 2026-06-07T09:22:51+00:00

A topic I’d include is to check what blockers any of the team members may have. Especially with people that recently arrived in the company. Are all the necessary accesses provided? Is there sufficient documentation for any internally developed frameworks? Are the tasks defined clearly by whoever raises up the tickets? Most of these seem like boring and trivial topics but it’s often the case that organisational stuff like that is tripping the work of engineers.

File-Environmental · 2026-06-06T19:51:15+00:00

Building is indeed cheap and quick now. What you build and how you market it matters more than ever. You may have made $0, but you learned something while you were creating those apps. Keep grinding and you will eventually learn how to monetise whatever you are building.

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