Listened to podcast on Domer (trades polymarkets). GPT assisted on what he says about his process and philosophy.
1. How Domer thinks about his job
At the highest level, Domer treats prediction markets as:
A full time research and decision making game
A series of one versus one intellectual battles against specific counterparties
A long term psychological test against his own biases, impulses, and burnout
He is not just “guessing the future.” He is building a system to:
Find mispriced events.
Understand why the other side is betting.
Make sure his own brain is not lying to him while he does it.
2. Where his edge comes from
a) Markets and structure
Domer focuses on:
Political markets, especially international ones.
Event markets like legal cases, airdrops, celebrities, awards.
Oscars and entertainment markets.
Occasionally macro style news events (Suez Canal, CZ, Britney, etc).
He generally avoids or sizes down in:
“Mention” markets where a single person can trivially affect the outcome.
Markets that are obviously open to direct manipulation by insiders.
He uses PolyMarket and Kalshi differently:
PolyMarket: on chain, transparent addresses, you can see PnL and account age. Great for inferring who you are facing.
Kalshi: more opaque. Counterparty inference comes from trade size, timing, and patterns, especially via Robinhood flow.
The structural edge is partly:
Knowing which environments are likely to be dumb money headline trading.
Knowing which environments are full of sharks where you must be paranoid.
b) Information edge
His real edge is not a secret model. It is:
Willingness to go deeper than everyone else:
Calling obscure experts.
Reading legal cases and regulatory details.
Watching documentary level background for a single market.
Ability to notice when everyone is just trading the headline and missing process details.
Examples:
Italy prime minister trade: Everyone treated “PM fired” as the final state. He asked “What if they cannot replace him?” and bet he would come back.
CZ vs airdrop: Everyone treated “six months” as a fixed calendar. He dug into prison reporting delays and release procedures.
He aims to become a temporary micro expert in:
Conservatorship law.
Tug operations in the Suez Canal.
Prison release mechanics.
Oscars precursor dynamics.
That willingness to grind weird details is a big part of his philosophy.
3. His process step by step
Step 1: Find markets and start as a maker
He often starts as a market maker rather than a directional punter.
Making markets across many contracts exposes him to markets he would not have thought to search for.
While quoting, he starts to notice where prices feel “off” and worth deeper investigation.
Step 2: Identify a potential mispricing
He looks for:
Markets where the crowd is treating a headline as deterministic.
Places where process, timing, or mechanics are being ignored.
International or niche areas where local chaos is familiar to him and unfamiliar to US centric traders.
Once a candidate mispricing is spotted:
He sketches a rough probability in his head.
Tests the price against that view.
Starts to size in if the gap is big.
Step 3: Study the counterparty, not just the event
This is one of the most important parts.
On PolyMarket, he can see:
Address history.
Account age.
Profit and loss.
He classifies counterparties as:
New accounts in one market only. Possible insiders or people with special info.
Long term losers. More likely to be headline chasers or hobbyists.
Long term winners. People who need to be taken very seriously.
On Kalshi, he infers from:
Size and aggressiveness.
Price insensitivity.
Whether order flow looks like retail or a pro.
The core psychological stance:
He always asks, “Why is this person so eager to take the other side, and what might they know that I do not?”
Step 4: Research sprint
He then goes into a research sprint:
Reads all the obvious articles and public sources.
Goes beyond that by:
Contacting domain experts.
Watching relevant documentaries or hearings.
Reading case law or technical procedures.
He is clear this is not academic. It is targeted:
He wants to know which parts of the public narrative are wrong, exaggerated, or incomplete.
He wants to find process bottlenecks, timing quirks, loopholes.
He also:
Tries to work out the other side’s mental model and see where it fails.
Adjusts his probability estimates as he learns new details.
Step 5: Decide whether to double, hold, or freeze
When price moves hard against him:
He does not blindly:
Double down because he “believes”.
Panic exit because “the market must know.”
Instead:
Sometimes he freezes.
Stops trading.
Investigates what changed.
Talks to other traders.
If he concludes someone likely has actual answer level information and is not price sensitive, he will stop adding and just live with the existing risk.
If he concludes the aggressive trader is just overconfident and wrong, he is willing to go bigger.
The CZ trade is his example of going big. The Spotify Wrapped trade is his example of freezing.
4. Fighting his own psychology
This is where he is very explicit.
a) Confirmation bias
He treats confirmation bias as an active opponent that is trying to empty his wallet.
His key technique:
Do not only search for reasons you are right.
Force yourself to inhabit the counterparty’s position:
Why are they betting this way?
What would the world have to look like for them to be correct?
What facts would make their story work?
That shift does two things:
It slows down the natural “I am right, let me collect supporting evidence” reflex.
It often reveals factual gaps or misread incentives that he had not considered.
He also:
Keeps biases “front of mind.”
Continually reminds himself that his brain wants narratives more than truth.
b) Anchoring and overconfidence
Markets he mentions reveal classic anchoring:
Sentences interpreted as exact dates.
Headlines treated as permanent states.
He tries to:
Break anchors by interrogating the underlying process:
“Six months sentence” is not “exactly six calendar months from now.”
“Prime minister fired” is not “this person is politically dead.”
His antidote to overconfidence is:
Genuine willingness to accept that, even with perfect process, he can lose.
Retelling stories where he did everything right and still got clipped by timing.
c) Dealing with insider risk without paranoia
He knows insider trading is possible, but he cannot operate in full paranoia all the time.
So he focuses on a few heuristics:
Price insensitivity near resolution is a warning sign.
New account, one market, huge size is suspicious.
Markets that are trivially controllable by a single person are kept small.
Psychologically, he accepts:
Sometimes he will get beaten by someone who simply knows.
He cannot eliminate that risk, he can only size and choose markets so that it does not kill him.
d) Addiction and dopamine
He is very aware that this job is addictive.
Signals of that:
Watch vibrating, sprinting upstairs from the couch mid show.
The rush of “eight new things to act on” every morning.
Continuous small hits of news and PnL.
He takes this seriously:
He has watched sports bettors destroy marriages and lives.
He saw that documentary where long term bettors talk about divorce and isolation.
That sits in his head as a warning of what happens if he never builds brakes and boundaries.
His tools:
Conscious planning of breaks and pauses.
Explicit agreement with his partner about limits.
Treating his pattern of behaviour as something to be managed, not as “oh, this is just me.”
5. Self awareness and therapy
He is unusually candid about therapy and introspection.
He goes to therapy periodically, not just in crisis.
He sees therapy as a structured way to maintain clarity and check his own stories.
His therapist asks him similar questions to the podcast hosts about how he became this self aware.
His answer for “how”:
Many painful mistakes, followed by obsessive post mortems.
A lot of time thinking in silence about:
What he did wrong.
What bias was active.
How he could change the process next time.
He actively sought out reading on:
Cognitive biases.
Dopamine and reward cycles.
Behavioural economics.
Crucially:
He emphasises that this only works because he chose to pursue it himself.
If people had simply lectured him, it would “go in one ear and out the other.”
The drive had to be internal curiosity plus the financial feedback loop.
He links self awareness and survival:
If you want to stay in this game, you must learn from mistakes.
Ignoring your own flaws is a fast route to going broke or burning out.
6. Philosophy about luck, money, and “Die with Zero”
Two big philosophical themes.
a) Luck
He thinks hard about luck:
He is not pretending that his success is purely skill.
He notes:
If he had not clicked certain links at certain times, he might be in a completely different career.
Many events he trades are themselves dominated by randomness and chaos.
This leads to:
Less ego around “I am a genius.”
More focus on process quality rather than outcome worship.
More sympathy for the idea that many people’s financial lives are shaped by randomness they did not choose.
b) Money as something to give away
He and his wife share a “Die with Zero” philosophy:
They intend to give away their wealth over time.
They do not plan to exit life with a pile of money sitting unused.
The goal is to deploy money during their lifetimes for meaningful impact.
Psychologically, that stance:
Reduces the temptation to treat every trade as an existential wealth quest.
Frames trading as work and game, not as a religious pursuit of a giant net worth score at death.
Aligns with his broader sense that luck and skill are intertwined, so hoarding has less moral glamour.
7. The core of Domer’s process and psychology
If you boil it right down, his process and philosophy look like this:
Curiosity as a weapon
Obsess over obscure details. Call experts. Treat each market as an opportunity to learn something weird and specific.Opponents as mirrors
Always ask why your counterparty is betting and what story they are telling themselves. Use that to stress test your own view.Bias as an enemy
Do not trust your default thinking. Make confirmation bias, anchoring, and overconfidence explicit targets to fight.Process over outcome
Accept that perfect decisions can still lose. Measure yourself more by whether you followed a good process than by one trade’s PnL.Boundaries against addiction
Recognise the dopamine loop. Build breaks and relational safeguards on purpose. Do not pretend you are immune.Humility about luck and money
See luck clearly. Use money as something to distribute, not an identity trophy.
That combination of sharp, opportunistic thinking and deliberate psychological hygiene is the real “edge” he describes, even if most people latch on to the headline trades instead.