# My new Polymarket Trading Strategy *the strategy that doesn't care which direction price goes* By [casatrick](https://paragraph.com/@casatrick) · 2026-07-03 --- So far I just am poking around btc 5m, 15m markets so completed my own strategy for btc market. I noticed that there's a trader on Polymarket quietly printing money on ETH 5-minute candles. Not through prediction. Not through directional edge. Through arbitrage - buying both sides of the same binary market and locking in a spread before resolution.I spent three weeks studying their trade history. There was something that hits my thinking. The Idea Binary prediction markets have a property most people ignore: YES + NO must equal $1.00 at settlement. One side pays $1.00 per share. The other pays $0.00. Doesn't matter which direction price goes. So if you buy YES at 60¢ and NO at 32¢, combined cost is 92¢. At settlement you collect $1.00 on whichever side wins. You made 8¢ on a guaranteed basis. No directional bet. That's the whole strategy. Buy both sides. Keep combined cost below $1.00. Hold to settlement. The hard part isn't the concept. It's execution. What their Trade Showed After analyzing roughly 3,200 trades across 244 candles: * Both sides bought on 94% of candles * Median combined VWAP: $0.74 * Combined cost below $1.00 on 91% of candles * Median clip size: ~15 shares * ~68% of fills in the final 60 seconds * Clip gap: ~3 seconds between trades * Return on turnover: ~30.6% The 3-second gap stood out. This isn't someone hammering the book. It's methodical accumulation - letting the market come to you, adding to whichever side gets cheaper, building toward a hedged position across the full candle. How the Bot Works Scans the CLOB every some miliseconds. When a signal fires, it clips. Fixed priority - first matching condition per tick wins. Four clip types: dip - first entry or cheap add when already hedged. Fires when cheaper side is at or below 55¢. stack - adds to held leg while still one-sided. Same 55¢ cap. late-tail - final 60 seconds, cheapest side at 32¢ or below. Convex upside if the underdog wins. no-signal - nothing to do this tick. Core discipline: once both legs exist, the combined VWAP guard is active. Bot won't add to either side if it pushes combined above $1.00. That guard is what keeps the locked spread positive. The Fee Math Nobody Talks About Polymarket crypto fee: Θ × shares × price × (1 - price), Θ = 0.07. Fees are highest around 50¢. Lowest near 0¢ or 100¢. Non-obvious implication: your cheapest clips near 30-35¢ also carry lower fees. Late-tail clips at 32¢ aren't just lottery tickets - they're the cleanest clips in fee terms. When they win, return is solid. On top of that: redemption gas on Polygon. Small positions get disproportionately eaten. Anything below $8.00 effective position gets ugly after gas. Minimum position size is not optional. What the Dashboard Shows ARB combined - the number to watch. Below 1.00 means locked spread. Above 1.00 means you need price to move your way to recover. Locked profit - matched pairs × (1 - combined). Guaranteed P&L assuming you hold to settlement. Goes up as you add hedged clips at good prices. Arb-blocked clips - signals rejected by the combined-VWAP guard. High count means the market isn't giving you cheap prices on both sides. Good signal to skip the candle. Candle win rate - % of candles with net positive P&L across all legs. More useful than clip win rate. A candle can have losing clips offset by a winning hedge. What I'd Build independently Settlement wait is the biggest friction. Gamma oracle takes at least 60 seconds after candle close. Capital locked during that window - not lost, but unavailable. In a high-frequency session this compounds fast. Better approach: track oracle confirmation times historically, predict settlement duration per candle type, allocate capital accordingly instead of treating all settlements as identical wait times. Maker/taker split also needs more work. Maker fills at bid+1¢ carry ~10% of taker fee. In a strategy where fee drag matters this much, posting more as maker and accepting slower fills could move the needle. Current version is mostly taker because the window is short. Worth testing properly. Where This Fits This isn't a direction bet. Not momentum, not mean reversion, not late-entry probability capture. Pure spread arbitrage on binary settlement mechanics. The edge exists because 5-minute ETH candle order books aren't perfectly efficient. Prices drift. One side gets cheap while the other stays elevated. The bot exploits that drift across hundreds of candles. Whether it stays exploitable depends on how many people run the same thing. For now, the math works. My Another Strategies References: github.com/casatrick/polymarket-arbitrag-bot --- *Originally published on [casatrick](https://paragraph.com/@casatrick/my-new-polymarket-trading-strategy)*