Will Manifold allow some markets to have a "spending cap" by 2025?
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Jan 2
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People often complain that some large/long-term markets are dominated by whales, who can outspend everyone else. In particular, some users are willing to spend much more on long-term markets than other users and so have an outsized influence on Manifold's long-term forecasts. I think one way to address this would be to see what difference it would make if some markets had a spending cap.

This could be an option when creating a market to click a box that prevents anyone trading in the market from spending more than 100 mana, or perhaps instead prevents them from holding more than some number of shares.

The idea is that this might let you get something in-between a normal market and a poll, where average opinion would be weighted a bit more than track record and where interest rates wouldn't be as much of a concern because it's only a trivial amount of mana for everyone involved.

It could also mitigate newstrading, as the first person to see breaking news that resolves a market could not claim of the excess liquidity.

I think it would really be worth trying at least as a trial run, and comparing the accuracy of these capped markets to uncapped markets. This resolves yes even if this is just tested out, but not adopted permanently.

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This moves Manifold even more in the direction of "a poll website with some markets thrown in for people to try to guess what the community thinks"

This would make markets less accurate and less useful.

If a whale moves a market to 80%, and you think the odds are more like 60%, you should bet against it. If you do that consistently and you are right, you will make a profit.

As for people scraping excess liquidity, that is a non-problem as market creators here generally add so little liquidity to begin with because there's no good incentive to do so.

If a whale moves a market that resolves in 2100 to 80%, you should probably ignore it or only spend the amount of mana you're willing to never see again. This is even more true now than it was when I made this post, as loans are gone now and long term markets are worse than ever.

I agree. No incentive for long-term bets anymore.

With higher volume you could potentially speculate or sell, but at current levels it's not even fun.

And a market with a shorter timeframe, including options for if a poll will say it was a good idea: