Widely read:
Aditya Roy/AI-Generated Image
A few days ago, an American software engineer named Sterling Crispin built a bot and set it loose on Polymarket. If you haven't heard of it, Polymarket is a betting exchange where people wager real money on whether future events will happen. Will a certain country invade another? Will there be a technology breakthrough this year? Thousands bet on such questions daily, convinced that their news reading gives them an edge.
Crispin's bot does something absurdly simple: it bets 'No' on every prediction. Automatically. Doesn't read news, doesn't track geopolitics. Just says no to everything. He called it 'Nothing Ever Happens.'
You can find the project on GitHub. It has a dry-run mode, which a colleague of mine is trying out.
Now here's the thing. Polymarket's own data shows roughly 73 per cent of predictions resolve as 'No.' The event doesn't happen. What everyone got excited about turns out to be noise. More telling: an analysis of 2.5 million accounts found 84 per cent of traders lost money. Most people would've been better off doing what the bot does. Assume nothing will happen and stay home.
Replace 'Polymarket traders' with 'F&O traders', and you have the exact same story. We know from SEBI that 90 per cent of individual derivatives traders lose money. The platform changes, but the dynamic never does: people armed with news and confidence bet on short-term outcomes and lose to math.
Someone I know started trading Nifty options in early 2023. An IT professional in Mumbai. Smart guy, understands Greek, reads the business papers. Over eighteen months, he placed about 200 trades and won roughly 65 per cent of them.
Still lost Rs 3.2 lakh.
Why? Average win: Rs 8,000. Average loss: Rs 22,000. He was right more often than wrong, but when he got it badly wrong, it wiped out everything. The bot's strategy would've saved him Rs 3.2 lakh and a year and a half of stress.
But this isn't really about Polymarket or F&O. It's about what happens when we read financial news.
Every week, something shows up that feels urgent. A crisis. A central bank surprise. A new technology that'll change everything. The message is always: this matters, act now. DeepSeek. Tariff wars. Every crisis over the past decade. Each one felt like it demanded portfolio action. Looking back, the right move was usually to do nothing and wait.
The bot's essentially a mechanical version of what I've been saying here for years. Don't react to the news. Don't predict next month. Don't confuse busy-ness with progress. A mindless programme with zero intelligence beats most human traders. Not despite being stupid. Because it can't get distracted by noise, smart people do dumb things with money.
For Indian investors? A boring SIP into two or three equity funds will beat most people who watch business TV every evening and reshuffle their portfolio every morning based on overnight news. The mechanical approach isn't a limitation. It's why it works. Removes the urge to be clever at exactly the wrong time.
The most useful skill isn't knowing what happens next. It's accepting that, usually, nothing much happens at all, and your money's set up to handle the rare times when something actually does.
The bot gets this because it lacks context. The rest of us learn it the hard way.
Also read: Let’s be boring
Ask Value Research 
New episodes every Friday 
New Process Alert 
Seems like you've uploaded a wrong QR code. Please upload the QR code downloaded from MF Central platform.
