Polymarket bots, lithium found: lots!, marathon shoe thoughts

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0:11This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm your host, Waylon Wong. I'm your other host, Darian Woods. And I guess continuing the hosting boasting, I'm also a host named Adrienne Ma. That's right. And it's our sincere pleasure to welcome you all to Indicators. of the week. On today's episode, we have who or what is making money off Polymarket? A seismic announcement from the world of geology. And the economics of running shoes. Stick around. Just like Jerome Powell said during his last press conference as FedShare, we are not going anywhere.

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2:13It's Indicators of the Week. Adrian, how about you start? My Indicator of the Week has to do with Polymarket and who is actually making money on it. Not me. Not yet. Not with that attitude. So you all know Polymarket. It's the prediction market platform that lets people bet on future events and they can win or lose money accordingly. Well, researchers recently at the University of Toronto, they did a study where they found the top 1 % of successful traders on Polymarket were responsible for collecting a certain percentage of the winnings. Anyone want to take a guess of what that is? The top 1%.

2:5090%. I'm going to go a little lower. I'll go 60. Pretty close to the middle of where you're at. The wisdom of the crowd. We did it. We did it once again. According to this study, 1 % of polymarket traders make 76 % of the profits. And that is my indicator of the week. All right. Well, it helps to be an insider trader. That's your takeaway. This study suggests that the vast majority of bettors on polymarket are losers. And we mean that financially, not pejoratively. Not only that, but according to an analysis by Bloomberg News, the winning trades are mostly done through bots, bots that are operated by, you know, technically savvy traders.

3:33And they calculate that over the past year and a few months, bots have made 75 percent of the trading volume on that platform. How do they know who's a bot and who's a human? So basically what Bloomberg did is they analyzed Polymarket trades that took place between January of last year and April of this year. And they assumed that accounts that average more than 50 trades a day or more than a thousand trades in total were bots. So kind of like high frequency trading in the normal stock market. Absolutely. And there's actually more research out there that shows that bots on Polymarket were more profitable than humans.

4:12not because they're better at predicting events correctly. They're actually worse at that. But the bots were better at getting into trades earlier, and so they got better prices. So what you're saying is the robots are already winning. You want to be a winner, should have been a robot. I'm next. My indicator is 2.3 million metric tons. That is the estimate of how much lithium is lurking in the Appalachian region, mostly in the Carolinas. The U.S. Geological Survey said this week that that's enough lithium to replace more than 300 years worth of imports. In other words, the U.S. wouldn't need to get lithium from another country for a century or more.

4:54The world's top producers of lithium, you might already know this, include Australia and China. And the U.S. considers it a critical mineral. And there's actually only one American company that produces lithium right now. So the U.S. imports more than half of the lithium it needs. And so the lithium's there. It, in theory, could be extracted. It's there for the taking, Darian. Just bring your hammer. No, the government describes this lithium in Appalachia as economically recoverable. And that is a jargon term that means it can be profitably produced. And it says this 2.3 million metric tons of lithium, that's enough to power 130 million EVs or 500 billion cell phones.

5:38So many cell phones. How do companies actually get the lithium out of the ground? It's not so simple. The lithium is stored in these rocks called pegmatites, which the U.S. Geological Survey says is similar to granite. And the machinery used to mine these rocks can emit carbon dioxide, and the process also depletes a lot of water. And so there is kind of a high environmental cost to getting this lithium out of the earth. And you said there's only one company in the U.S. that actually mines lithium. Yeah, the mine is based in Nevada, and it has the only lithium-producing mine in the country right now, although there are some other sites that are potentially under development in the U.S.

6:16So definitely still in the early stages of building the domestic supply chain for lithium. Thank you, Waylon. Darian, bring us home. My indicator is 1 hour, 59 minutes and 30 seconds. You might click that I'm talking about Sebastian Saue on Sunday. this is a brilliant human achievement of breaking that two-hour milestone for the marathon officially for the first time ever um but it's also a technological milestone because you know he's wearing some pretty special shoes the adidas adizero adios pro evo 3 shoes okay uh question though like can we get our hands on these super shoes yeah like at footlocker at the mall they yeah no they came out last week uh if you got a spare five hundred dollars um they did sell out very fast but they uh weigh about as much of a bar of soap and whoa it really does show how engineered sports has become and i want to just show you a picture um so do you want to just have a look at this picture of them.

7:27Ooh. It's like you can almost see through them. They look so thin. I'm not sensing much outrage from you, but like... Outrage? I mean... To me, these just look like springs. This is just like... Like moon shoes or whatever those things are. Fair enough. But you guys seem pretty phased. You've gotten used to these super shoes. To run a sub two-hour marathon, which didn't the second place guy also do? Like, you have to have, like, a lot of skill. So I'm not going to begrudge them, like, springy shoes. Because, like, if you put these shoes on me, I wouldn't even get, like, you know, I would still be running, like, a six-hour marathon.

8:03No, all due respect to Sebastian Sawe. But, like, my friends who, like, I've definitely downgraded in my esteem the times that my friends are getting on marathons after seeing these shoes. I know they've been around for, like, a decade. But I was under a rock. And I just, I'm stunned by how far we have fallen from God's grace about how to run. We just springboard our way around the track. Are you saying the serpent of the garden of Eden was like, would you like these cutting edge running shoes? And that was the original sin. Yeah, I don't know. So to me, this is just emblematic of how engineered sports in general has become.

8:44like we've had carbon fiber plate put in midsoles that's like almost compulsory these days for marathon runners you've also got other sports like in pickleball one of the top selling rackets i learned from a quartz article costs 250 dollars and in road bikes you've got ultra light carbon fiber frames with electronic gear shifting and and that dramatically increases the price and people feel like they need these to keep up with their peers. The Quartz article called this upgrade anxiety because you've got these companies just consistently coming up with new innovations, new product launches, and that meaning that you feel like you just have to keep buying and buying just to keep up with your hobby.

9:29Does it increase your fun? I'll leave that to the people who are doing it. Well, it definitely increases your consumption, which is probably the ultimate goal here, no? The ultimate goal is to keep the economy spinning.

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