Polymarket’s daily high-temperature bucket markets: bet which temperature interval a city’s daily high will land in — Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo and more. Multi-outcome buckets, decent liquidity.
I ran them for a while. Here’s what hurt and what actually works.
Cheap YES Lottery
Buy YES at 0.1–2¢ in narrow or extreme buckets where your model shows a small edge, then size up. One hit pays 50–5000x, enough to cover a long losing streak.
The most promising line. Capital-efficient: little money covers 20–30 cities at once. Ants moving house.
But win rate is brutal — dozens of losers in a row is normal. Forecast models update slowly; you often trade on stale data and the edge evaporates. Low-price buckets are illiquid — you can’t stop out mid-flight, you hold to settlement.
Expensive NO Grind
The idea: buy NO at 80–99¢ in extreme buckets, near-certain small profit.
You simply can’t buy it. It shows 85¢, you lift and slippage takes you to 99¢ — no one sells a near-certain winner cheap. Edge rounds to zero, capital efficiency dies. Abandoned.
Forecast vs. Market Edge
Compare professional forecasts — JMA, ECMWF, AccuWeather — against the market’s implied probabilities. Only fire when mispricing exceeds 5–8%, buying 5–30¢ mid-to-cheap buckets.
Painful in practice.
Forecasts lag. JMA and ECMWF refresh far slower than the market; by the time you get the latest run, the price has been arbed away. The market gets more efficient every week — bots and real-time data shops abound, and manually beating them on speed is a losing game.
Scanning 20+ cities by hand, comparing, deciding, executing — one to two hours gone. Fatiguing. Emotion creeps in, and after missing a few edges you start revenge-trading.
One person caps at 10–20 concurrent positions. With dozens of weather markets running daily, you bleed opportunity.
Doing edge-hunting by hand is racing pro automation on foot. Not how small capital survives.
Open-Source Starting Points
A few repos I found useful when exploring automation:
- suislanchez/polymarket-kalshi-weather-bot: dual-platform, 31-member GFS ensemble, scans every 5 minutes
- alteregoeth-ai/weatherbot: Polymarket-focused, 20+ cities, Kelly + EV filter, simulation mode
- yangyuan-zhen/PolyWeather: web dashboard + Telegram alerts
And on Twitter, @AlterEgo_eth, @0xMovez, @woody_research share solid live data and code notes.
Risk Management
Manual or automated, rule one for small accounts: don’t donate the bankroll.