High-Frequency Scalping, Earning $100K Annually: The Most "Boring" Profit Myth on Polymarket

Original author: Ma He, Foresight News

Another miracle has occurred on Polymarket.

Through extensive monitoring, frenzied betting, and over the course of a year, a certain address has managed to turn small profits into a net gain of $100,000 through compounding.

The address we are reviewing, planktonXD (0x4ffe49ba2a4cae123536a8af4fda48faeb609f71), is an extremely typical high-frequency quantitative trader. Since joining in February 2025, in just one year, it has generated a net profit of $106,000 through over 61,000 predictions.

In prediction markets, most people are speculating on "black swan" events or chasing major news, but planktonXD has taken a completely different path: extreme certainty and terrifying execution frequency.

Looking at planktonXD's historical trading data, the most astonishing aspect is its 61,000 predictions. From February 2025 to February 2026, it averages about 170 trades per day.

This frequency far exceeds the limits of manual human operation, confirming that this player uses an automated trading script (Bot). It is not "predicting" outcomes but "harvesting" price spreads.

A very interesting phenomenon is that planktonXD's "Biggest Win" is only $2,527.4. Compared to its total profit of $100,000, this single largest win appears very "small" (accounting for only about 2% of total profit).

Some retail players always hope to make a big score, betting all their chips on a judgment they are supremely confident in.

Winning is good, of course, but losing makes it hard to get back to the table.

Taking a step back, even if you win every time you go ALL IN, just one loss means losing big.

Reviewing its trading history, it never goes all-in on a single extreme event, nor does it bet on high odds. Its profit curve shows a perfect smooth 45-degree upward angle with almost no significant drawdowns. This indicates it employs a market-making strategy: placing orders on both sides of the order book to capture the bid-ask spread, or exploiting tiny price discrepancies between different markets for micro-arbitrage.

It does not always hold positions long-term (Buy and Hold) but frequently enters and exits the market. This "light position, fast turnover" approach drastically reduces single-point risk. Even if an unexpected event occurs in a specific prediction market (like a sudden election result change), its impact on the total capital pool is minimal.

This quantitative bot does not specialize in trading vertical niches like weather, as some do, but places bets across multiple sectors: sports, weather, crypto prices, politics, etc. It monitors thousands of prediction markets across the entire platform 24/7, searching for moments of pricing inefficiency.

VALORANT Challengers serves as a classic case study for this trader.

You can think of it as the "minor league" or "regional league" of the esports world. Fuego and LYON are professional teams from the Latin American region. Due to the small audience and extremely high information asymmetry of such matches, they become a "paradise for arbitrage" for quantitative bots.

It purchased 3,664.9 shares for Fuego to win at a price of 0.1¢ each. This trade ultimately yielded a return of $874.09, with a staggering return rate of 23,750%!

This is a classic case of "small position, big odds." In markets with extremely poor liquidity or where the public is extremely bearish on a particular option—long-tail markets like round-by-round results in esports matches—it uses a Bot to monitor options mispriced to near "zero." It doesn't need to predict who will win; it only needs to know that Fuego's probability of winning is definitely more than 0.1%. This is essentially harvesting the market's "extreme sentiment" and "lack of liquidity."

Speaking of sentiment, crypto prices embody it most vividly.

Will the SOL price drop to $130 between January 12-18?

It invested about $16 at a price of 0.7¢ (the market believed the probability of success was less than 1%), ultimately taking away $1,574, achieving an astonishing return rate of 9,285%.

Why did such an "almost impossible" prediction allow it to make big money at that time?

During periods of high volatility in the cryptocurrency market, mainstream predictions tend to be bullish or sideways. planktonXD captures those "extremely bearish" options priced at 0.1¢ - 1¢ around the clock. To ordinary people, these options are worthless paper, but to quant traders, they are extremely cheap insurance. As long as the market experiences one deep wick or sudden negative news, this "worthless paper" can skyrocket a thousandfold instantly. Furthermore, in specific price ranges (e.g., SOL < $40), because the current price is far from the prediction price, the order book is often very thin. planktonXD uses automated scripts to place orders in these "no-man's-land," scooping up cheap shares dumped due to panic or misoperations, essentially acting as a probability arbitrageur.

planktonXD's SOL strategy shows that on Polymarket, buying "impossibility" does not mean it believes it will happen, but because the "probability of occurrence" is underestimated by the market. It spends a few dollars to buy out the market's one-in-ten-thousand chance of panic, which is a classic "antifragile" trade.

planktonXD's success offers three core insights for ordinary retail traders:

The power of compound interest should not be underestimated. Earning 0.5% daily through high-frequency trading yields far more stable returns after a year than hitting one 10x coin. Technology is the ultimate skill. In the Crypto era, quantitative tools and API capabilities are standard for top players. Finally, certainty outweighs odds. In prediction markets, finding those small-profit opportunities with extremely high probability (e.g., over 90% certainty) is easier to survive on than gambling on 50/50 major events.

After all, the highest level of play in prediction markets is not predicting the future, but managing probability and liquidity.