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 where people bet real money on whether future events will happen. Will a country invade another? Will there be a major technology breakthrough this year? Thousands bet on such questions daily, each convinced their news reading gives them an edge.
Crispin’s bot does something almost lauglhably simple: it bets “No” on every single prediction. Automatically. It doesn’t read the news, analyse geopolitics or study anything. It just says no — nothing will happen — every single time.
He named it, with what I can only assume was a wink, Nothing Ever Happens.
The project is open source. You can check it out on GitHub. It even has a dry-run mode so you don’t need to risk actual money. A colleague of mine is trying it out right now to see if it’s as ridiculous as it sounds.
Turns out, it’s not ridiculous at all.
Polymarket’s own public data shows that roughly 73% of all predictions on the platform resolve as “No.” The dramatic event everyone got worked up about simply doesn’t occur. Most of the time, what looked urgent was just noise.
Even more telling: an analysis of over 2.5 million accounts found that 84% of all traders lost money.
The overwhelming majority of people carefully analysing world events and placing what they believed were informed bets would have been better off doing exactly what this mindless bot does. Assume nothing happens. Stay home.
If this sounds familiar, it should.
F&O parallel
Replace “Polymarket traders” with “F&O traders”, and you’re reading the same story.
We know from Sebi’s research that roughly 90% of individual derivatives traders in India lose money. The platform changes, the terminology changes, but the underlying pattern never does: people who think they can predict short-term moves — armed with news and confidence — consistently lose to the reality that most predictions fail and costs accumulate.
Let me tell you about someone I know.
An IT professional in Mumbai started trading Nifty options in early 2023. Smart guy. Reads business papers, watches market analysis videos, understands option Greeks.
Over eighteen months, he placed roughly 200 trades. He won on about 65% of them — which sounds impressive until you see what happened to his account.
He still lost ₹3.2 lakh overall.
The math was brutal. His average winning trade made about ₹8,000. His average losing trade cost ₹22,000.
So he was right far more often than he was wrong. But the handful of times he got it badly wrong wiped out everything and more. He would have been better off if his laptop had refused to open the trading app.
The bot’s strategy would have saved him ₹3.2 lakh — and eighteen months of stress.
News illusion
But the real lesson isn’t about Polymarket or F&O.
It’s about what happens inside our heads when we consume financial news as investors.
Every week — sometimes every day — something arrives that feels urgent and consequential. A geopolitical crisis. A central bank surprise. A technology shift that’s supposedly going to change everything.
The message is always the same: this is different, this matters, you need to act right now.
We saw it recently with DeepSeek. Before that with tariff wars. Before that with every other panic of the past decade.
In the moment, each one felt like it demanded an immediate portfolio response. Looking back, the correct move for almost all of them was to do precisely nothing and let it pass.
The bot is a mechanical version of what I’ve been saying in this column for years.
Don’t react to the news cycle. Don’t try to predict next month. Don’t confuse activity with progress.
The fact that a mindless programme with no intelligence manages to beat most human traders should give every active investor pause.
It’s not winning despite being stupid. It’s winning because it cannot get distracted by the noise that makes otherwise intelligent people do foolish things with their money.
There’s a straightforward parallel for Indian retail investors.
A simple SIP into two or three equity mutual funds — requiring no expertise and no attention to daily news — will outperform the vast majority of people who spend evenings watching business television and mornings reshuffling portfolios based on whatever happened overnight.
The mechanical simplicity isn’t a compromise. It’s the entire reason the approach works. It removes the human urge to react, predict and be clever at exactly the wrong moments.
The hard lesson
The most valuable skill in investing isn’t knowing what will happen next.
It’s developing the quiet conviction that most of the time nothing much will happen — and that your portfolio is built to survive just fine when, on rare occasions, something actually does.
The bot knows this instinctively because it knows nothing at all.
The rest of us have to learn it the hard way.