Hacker News: convexly

New comment by convexly in "Traders placed over $1B in perfectly timed bets on the Iran war"

convexly — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 19:17:56 +0000

That claim is testable. The 2026 microstructure work on the Kalshi tape (72M trades, Becker) documented a systematic +1.12% excess return for liquidity providing makers and a symmetric -1.12% for takers, plus a longshot bias where 1-cent yes shares pay -41% EV and 1-cent no shares pay +23% EV. That edge is in the market microstructure layer. A patient maker who never trades the frontpage market makes money on the marginal bidder asymmetry alone.

Akey, Gregoire, Harvie, Martineau (2026) on Polymarket find that the top 1% of wallets capture about 84% of all profits, and that the largest whale wallets are NOT the most sophisticated. Large capital systematically bleeds expected value to small order traders. Reichenbach and Walther (2025) document within-Polymarket skill persistence at the 124M-trade scale, so skill differentials are measurable across users distinct from the insider trading question.

We scored 10k Polymarket wallets. Calibration barely predicts profit

convexly — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 16:00:20 +0000

Article URL: https://www.convexly.app/blog/polymarket-10k-wallet-study

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47825267

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by convexly in "We tested the insider trading claim on Polymarket with Taleb-proof methods"

convexly — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 13:00:28 +0000

I ran this analysis using Convexly, a calibration-tracking tool I'm working on. The Brier scoring math in the post is the same math that runs in the product. Disclosure out of the way.

What I did: pulled trade data for the top 100 Polymarket profit wallets from the public API, resolved 3,651 unique positions, and computed per-wallet Brier scores. Then tested the correlation between calibration and profit using Spearman rank correlation (not Pearson, because the profit distribution is fat-tailed, Hill alpha ~1.6).

The headline finding: Spearman r = +0.608 between Brier score and realized profit. Worse calibration predicts bigger profits. The correlation gets stronger when you drop the top 10 by profit (+0.72), so it isn't outlier-driven. The worst-calibrated whales earn 4.66x the median profit of the better-calibrated whales.

The leaderboard is a concentration ranking. Median single-event concentration: 69.8%. Twenty of the top 100 made their biggest money on the 2024 election.

After separating the four wallets Chainalysis publicly attributed to "Theo" (the French trader who commissioned private YouGov polls), 8 wallets remain in a narrow cluster on the popular-vote markets in a 3-week window around election day. Chainalysis did not link BetTom42 or alexmulti to Theo.

Full 47-column CSV is downloadable from the post. Happy to answer methodology questions.

We tested the insider trading claim on Polymarket with Taleb-proof methods

convexly — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 13:00:03 +0000

Article URL: https://www.convexly.app/blog/polymarket-whale-audit

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47765107

Points: 6

# Comments: 1

New comment by convexly in "Show HN: I built a 2-min quiz that shows you how bad you are at estimating"

convexly — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 22:30:01 +0000

Quick update: 1,934 quiz completions, 44.5% scored overconfident. Most interesting finding was that the quiz itself got more engagement than the product behind it. Added educational tooltips, a public roadmap with voting, and UTM tracking based on feedback here and from users that reached out directly!

New comment by convexly in "Show HN: I built a 2-min quiz that shows you how bad you are at estimating"

convexly — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 23:56:55 +0000

Both really good points. The research does suggest that the core skill does transfer. The quiz can help with long horizon predictions. The mechanism itself seems to be the actual awareness of overconfidence rather than just domain-specific knowledge. With that being said, the gap between the quiz and real-world application is real, and tracking both over time is part of why I built the decision logging side. For your question about teams, that's a built-in feature already! Submissions are "sealed" so you submit before seeing others. The team feature also has a believability-weighted aggregation based on each submitter's track record, and I also built an IC mode for investment committees. The problem you describe about one calibrated person in a room with two uncalibrated ones is what the sealed model prevents. Everyone makes draws their own conclusion, then they compare!

New comment by convexly in "Show HN: I built a 2-min quiz that shows you how bad you are at estimating"

convexly — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 10:32:58 +0000

Thank you! Happy to hear to how it compares!

New comment by convexly in "Show HN: I built a 2-min quiz that shows you how bad you are at estimating"

convexly — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 23:04:07 +0000

That's all true. I'm a solo founder and have been using Claude heavily to build this. It definitely shows in many places, and I'll make sure to clean those up. I did not expect to get this many visits from a show HN (almost at 1600 quiz takers from the last few hours alone). The core math is sound, but I agree the presentation needs more care. Appreciate the honest feedback!

New comment by convexly in "Show HN: I built a 2-min quiz that shows you how bad you are at estimating"

convexly — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 22:36:02 +0000

The change to buttons was based on feedback I got today. The slider disappearing is a bug. Pushing a fix now!

New comment by convexly in "Show HN: I built a 2-min quiz that shows you how bad you are at estimating"

convexly — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 21:45:11 +0000

Made a few changes based on feedback from this thread: full results now shown immediately with no email gate, changed the UX to include true/false/uncertain buttons + a confidence slider, I cleaned up the quiz result page, and fixed the die probability question. Thanks for all the honest feedback!

New comment by convexly in "Show HN: I built a 2-min quiz that shows you how bad you are at estimating"

convexly — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 21:39:25 +0000

Can't fault that, actually a great workflow. Calibration helps you know which ones to research!

New comment by convexly in "Show HN: I built a 2-min quiz that shows you how bad you are at estimating"

convexly — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 21:26:21 +0000

Update at 2 hours: 1350+ quiz takers! 50% overconfident, 40% well-calibrated, and 10% underconfident. The average score is around 0.228, with the best score still at 0.007 (nearly perfect). The pattern so far is people are most overconfident in the 70-90% range, but are right closer to ~55% of the time.

New comment by convexly in "Show HN: I built a 2-min quiz that shows you how bad you are at estimating"

convexly — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 21:22:02 +0000

Great recommendation. That was one of the biggest influences for starting to write my decisions down and then building this.

New comment by convexly in "Show HN: I built a 2-min quiz that shows you how bad you are at estimating"

convexly — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 21:21:00 +0000

That's fair, I'll flag those or maybe even add regional context. Nice score, well above average!

New comment by convexly in "Show HN: I built a 2-min quiz that shows you how bad you are at estimating"

convexly — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 21:18:12 +0000

That's awesome, hadn't seen this one! I like the confidence interval approach.

New comment by convexly in "Show HN: I built a 2-min quiz that shows you how bad you are at estimating"

convexly — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 21:15:33 +0000

That's honest feedback, I appreciate it. The post quiz shouldn't feel like a sales funnel. I'll clean that up. Working on it!

New comment by convexly in "Show HN: I built a 2-min quiz that shows you how bad you are at estimating"

convexly — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 21:13:37 +0000

Your point on scoring is correct, if you're 100% confident and right on everything you would score a perfect 0. The calibration insight is in how you handle the questions where you don't know the answer. Say you're highly knowledgeable and 95% confident on everything, but get 2 wrong scores compared to someone that says they are 70% confident on those same two questions. That would indicate that you are overconfident compared to the other person!

New comment by convexly in "Show HN: I built a 2-min quiz that shows you how bad you are at estimating"

convexly — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 21:09:40 +0000

Actually means you have really strong knowledge. That 17% gap though is what gets people in trouble in high-stakes settings!

New comment by convexly in "Show HN: I built a 2-min quiz that shows you how bad you are at estimating"

convexly — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 21:05:25 +0000

That's definitely better framing for this question. Much cleaner way to illustrate that point!

New comment by convexly in "Show HN: I built a 2-min quiz that shows you how bad you are at estimating"

convexly — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 21:04:19 +0000

I just removed that, full results should be fully visible without email! A hard refresh should show the update.