The strategies that actually work.

01Read the resolution text before the odds

The single most profitable habit, and the least glamorous. Markets that look identical resolve differently: "wins the election" and "is inaugurated" diverge on a contested count, and "announces before December 31" can settle on a press release nobody read. Every market names its source and its deadline. The traders who lose most often are the ones who priced the headline instead of the contract, which is why reading a market properly comes before any model.

02Fade the longshot, respect the favourite

Across a century of betting data, cheap outcomes are systematically overpriced and heavy favourites slightly underpriced. People pay for the dream of a large payout, so a five-cent share tends to win less than five percent of the time. The condition: this is a statistical tendency across many bets, not a rule for any single one, and it disappears the moment fees exceed the bias. Ninety-cent favourites tie up a lot of money for a small return, so this works as a portfolio habit, not a hero trade.

03Trade the latency between news and price

Prediction markets are fast in the famous questions and slow everywhere else. A line-up published an hour before kickoff, a filing posted at four in the afternoon, a polling average updated overnight: the information is public, and in the thinner markets the price can take hours to reflect it. The edge is not secret knowledge. It is being the person who looked at the right source, which is exactly what a fund reading twelve families at once is built to do.

04Arbitrage related markets

Prices that describe the same world sometimes contradict each other. A candidate priced at sixty cents to win the presidency and forty to win the primary is a stated impossibility. A championship market and its individual match markets can drift apart. Multi-outcome markets whose prices sum well above one dollar are paying you to take the other side of the whole book. The condition is brutal: both legs must be liquid enough to fill, or the arbitrage exists only on your screen.

05Fade the crowd that is emotionally invested

In culture and sport, a large share of the volume comes from fans and supporters rather than analysts. Home teams, popular players and beloved films carry a small sentiment premium. It is a modest, repeatable bias, and it inverts in markets dominated by professionals, so it belongs where the crowd is enthusiastic rather than where it is sharp.

06Sell time, not opinion

Some markets resolve on a date with a long, dull path to it. Buying a ninety-cent favourite that settles in four days is not a view on the outcome so much as a rental of capital, and the return should be judged against what that capital could do elsewhere, including the yield idle stablecoins already earn. The failure mode is the tail: the rare event that would take the whole position.

07Make the market instead of taking it

Posting a resting order and waiting rather than crossing the spread changes the arithmetic in two ways. You buy at your price rather than the market’s, and you pay the lower fee: on Opusfund, 1% as a taker and 0.5% as a maker. Over hundreds of trades that difference compounds into real money, and it is the most mechanical edge on this list. It costs patience, and sometimes the fill never comes.

08Grade yourself, ruthlessly

The only strategy that improves the other eight. Record what you thought, at what price, and what happened, then check whether the things you called seventy percent happened about seventy percent of the time. That is calibration, measured with a Brier score or log loss, and it is the difference between a trader with a method and one with a story. Most people skip it because the answer is often unflattering.

09The strategy of not betting

Most markets are priced correctly. The crowd is a good forecaster, and the default assumption should be that it is right, which means the correct action on the majority of screens is to move on. A day with no bet is the system working, and a fund that trades every day is usually paying fees for the privilege of being average.

10How your CEO runs these

Strategies are only worth something if they run every day, on every market, without getting bored. Your CEO reads resolution text before it prices anything, sweeps for latency across families while you sleep, checks related markets for contradictions, prefers maker orders when patience is affordable, grades every call it makes against what happened, and passes on the overwhelming majority of what it sees. You can direct any of it in plain words, including telling it to stop.