FINDINGS: 'The fill model is the next scorer' section (A2 chain grade -$7.54/fill x1344 confirms the surge kill; oracle harness chain grade vetoes the ledger-positive tiers; virtual-book +26% variance footnote; the five tandem tests and the makers-on-the-wall through-line). HANDOFF: snapshot -> 07-23 (7-wallet rev 5, dark flags, Friday agenda incl #20/#21). READMEs: /test consolidation row, measurement-harness research row, study statuses + new script inventory. Archive: value/ (closed 07-19) + its test, ETHERSCAN_MIGRATION.md, order_probe v1 -> archive/; replay_out/ gitignored; links repaired. Tests: all 7 active scripts pass post-move. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
4.6 KiB
VALUE — the undervalued-market paper bot
STATUS: CLOSED 2026-07-19 — hypothesis refuted (1W/993L, 0.075x; see PLAN.md post-mortem). App destroyed; files kept as the record.
A silo'd experiment: can systematically buying sub-2¢ Polymarket contracts beat their price? Research says yes on paper (~1.24x gross); this bot exists to find out if the fills are real. It shares no code path, state, app, or wallet with the copy trader — see Silo rules before touching anything.
Why this exists (30-second version)
A calibration study over 13.5M trusted resolved bets (2026-07-17, details in PLAN.md) found Polymarket well-calibrated above 60¢, longshots 2–60¢ systematically OVERpriced — and the tail below 2¢ UNDERpriced: entries at an average 0.82¢ resolved winners 1.02% of the time (1.24x, ≈+20%/$ net of fees, z≈+12 market-clustered). The effect survives excluding skilled wallets and refunds, and concentrates near expiry. History can't prove the asks are actually fillable — that's this bot's one job.
How it works (valuebot.py, single file, pure stdlib)
Every 5 minutes:
- Scan gamma for active markets, soonest-ending first (the edge lives near expiry; gamma 422s past offset ~2000, which conveniently caps the scan to exactly that window). Any outcome marked ≤ 2¢ is a candidate.
- Fill or honest miss: fetch the REAL CLOB ask ladder; a $1 FAK either
fully fills inside
min(2¢, best_ask × 1.05)— the same protected band the live copy executor sends — or logs a MISS. No phantom fills, ever (the 2026-07-16 paper-parity lesson, inherited from birth). - Guards: flat $1/ticket (venue minimum = reality), event cap 1 (correlated dust resolves together), 300-ticket portfolio cap, 6h re-check cooldown per token, entry taker fee by category.
- Settle at chain truth: payout vectors from the CTF contract
(
payoutNumerators) — wins pay 1.0, 0.5 refunds are real, losses 0. Never trusts CLOB winner flags or price marks. - Publish: state + feed + fills committed back to this repo
(
valuebot: paper feed [skip ci]), same pull-rebase-push discipline as the copy books.
The verdict (what decides paper → real money)
Break-even hit rate ≈ 1.05% at 1¢ entries. Needs ~2,000 resolved tickets
(2–6 weeks). Pre-registered kill criteria (PLAN.md): fill rate <30%, or
realized multiple <1.1x after 2k tickets, or can't deploy >$50/week. Track:
stats + realized_multiple + fill_rate in the feed. Early losses are
EXPECTED — at ~1% hit rate the first hundreds of tickets are mostly Ls; the
multiple is meaningless until refunds/wins accumulate.
File map
| file | what |
|---|---|
valuebot.py |
the whole bot — scan, fill model, settle, publish |
PLAN.md |
research findings, strategy spec, rollout gates |
valuebot_state.json |
the book (bot-committed; don't hand-edit while it runs) |
valuebot.json |
published feed (future jaxperro.com/value reads this) |
valuebot_fills.jsonl |
append-only fill ledger |
start.sh |
Fly boot: clone main, ls-remote clone-guard, exec bot |
fly.Dockerfile |
python:3.12-slim + git; NO pip deps by design |
../fly.value.toml |
app wwf-valuebot (arn); no http_service on purpose — nothing auto-restarts it under a state edit (README gotcha 15) |
../tests/test_valuebot.py |
6 stub tests — fill band, thin-miss, event cap, cooldown, settle math |
Ops
python3 tests/test_valuebot.py # no-network stub tests
python3 value/valuebot.py --once # one real scan cycle, no publishing
flyctl logs -a wwf-valuebot --no-tail # watch cycles ("book: cash …")
flyctl deploy --remote-only -c fly.value.toml --ha=false -a wwf-valuebot
# image change (start.sh/Dockerfile);
# code changes need only a machine restart
Secrets on wwf-valuebot: ALCHEMY_RPC_URL (chain settles),
GITHUB_TOKEN (fine-grained PAT, contents-RW this repo — state durability +
feed). Without the token the bot trades but rewinds to the last committed
state on restart (it warns at boot).
Silo rules (do not break these)
- Nothing under
value/may importcopybot.pyorcopytrade.py— the ~60 lines of book/fee/payout helpers are duplicated here ON PURPOSE. Read-only research libs (trust,smart_money,payouts) are allowed. - Never share: state files, feeds, Fly apps, webhooks, or (when real money ever comes) the wallet. The copy trader must be un-affectable from here.
bankroll/stake/cap changes and the paper→real gate are the USER's call.