From what I can tell, the best all-time ROI on Polymarket is only about 17%*. 

If smart money can get rich in prediction markets, why aren't they? 

*leaderboard ranks by total profit rather than % so its possible non-whales have higher ROI

From what I can tell, the best all-time ROI on Polymarket is only about 17%*. 

If smart money can get rich in prediction markets, why aren't they? 

*leaderboard ranks by total profit rather than % so its possible non-whales have higher ROI

https://polymarket.com/leaderboard

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or the whales are the dumb money. but I have a strong feeling there are very few active traders who have even doubled their money.

i think your footnote answers the question, people who are moving the largest sums are making more conservative bets

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Not unless there is smart money in the market. Based on the leaderboard, the whales are not the smart money. They're providing most of the liquidity though, which suggests the markets aren't accurate.

Shouldn’t an accurate prediction market have razor thin margins?

Maybe I'm a stats guy, but I feel like "prediction market" will go down as yet another crypto misnomer.

In a frequentist point of view, the probability surfaced by polymarket is just an average of possible experiment samples that we can never take.

Bayesian? Its the global prior that updates on each trade.

I take a market view (not stats). The price is just the last marginal clearing price that two people agreed on. Much ado about nothing and it has no real information on the event.