The “Wall Street Journal” explains in today’s edition that a French trader won 50 million by betting on the triumph of the Republican candidate.
The service message is clear: you should never bet an amount that you cannot afford to lose, and even less so on a cryptocurrency betting site like Polymarket.com. Little story in the story, it is precisely the crazy success of the French trader Théo which will cause its ban on French territory, even if we wish courage to the legislator in controlling the use of VPN.
On Polymarket, you could bet on everything and especially anything: the future winner of the Champions League, for the classic, the fact that Taylor Swift will be pregnant in 2024 for the wacky. But in this absurd world where we can put money on a hypothetical presidential pardon granted to P. Diddy by Joe Biden (yes, there are many Qanons who believe in such nonsense to the point of losing a few dollars on the question, Editor’s note), Théo’s fable is creating a buzz.
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A French trader
The very serious “Wall Street Journal” had interviewed ahead of the election the man who would be a French trader and who of course remains anonymous. Our man boasted of having bet $28 million on a Donald Trump victory, as well as on his electoral success in several key states and in the popular vote – on this point, we must recognize that he had some flair, Donald Trump not having won in 2016 and 2020.
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A French trader bets on the “neighbor effect”
To the “Wall Street Journal”, he assured that he had no link with the Republican’s campaign team and had taken this risk by not relying on traditional polls, but by using another method, the “neighbor effect” which consists of not asking who you are going to vote for but who your neighbor is going to vote for. For Théo, this allows us to better understand the political reluctance to affirm our vote and therefore to ease the conscience of certain Trumpist voters who would not take responsibility.
Clearly, it is easier to claim that your neighbor is voting for Donald Trump than to affirm your vote for the Republican candidate. He also believed that the most convinced Trumpists refused to respond to the various pollsters, which added bias, even if the institutes of course weight the raw results of a poll. Théo claimed that he had asked a private institute to conduct this type of poll for him, with breathtaking results in favor of Donald Trump, hence the absolutely crazy amount bet on such a political event. We remain doubtful about the fact that an individual, however rich he or she may be, would finance a survey for these personal purposes before betting a sum, however substantial it may be. Of course, the private institute in question remains confidential.
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The very serious “Financial Times” questions the success of our champion of the day. A study by Martin Boon, co-founder of Deltapoll, is cited, which returns to the neighboring effect, explaining that the method can both be more relevant in certain cases, but also generate more misleading forecasts. For Sir John Curtice, professor of political science at the University of Strathclyde, interviewed by the economic newspaper, Theo’s bet was not as risky as is claimed.
“The (traditional) polls were not far from the truth. They probably underestimated Trump by less than 4 points in most key states. Nobody would have noticed such errors if the final gap had been even more pronounced,” he explains. Clearly, the result is within the pollsters’ margin of error…
Because this is the principle of clairvoyance: only remember the correct predictions of the horoscope.
