US President Donald Trump — through speeches, executive orders, social media postings, a ubiquitous public presence and a dizzying array of other premeditated, impulsive or incendiary proclamations — specializes in flooding the zone.
He inevitably leaves flotsam in his wake, whether by accident or design. The net effect is to plunge a global audience into uncertainty about his broader designs, even if some of his core goals — a headlong accretion of executive power, for example — are clear.
So what is an overwhelmed public to do when confronted by the reality that the most powerful person in the world is also a professional distraction machine and chaos agent? Our advice: Exhale. Keep paying attention, of course, but exhale. Patience is a virtue.
Illustration: Mountain People
As it turns out, Trump rarely follows up on most of the stuff he churns out daily. We turned to prediction markets to test that assertion, and the data supports us. In fact, it pays to bet on Trump doing absolutely nothing. You would have made a US$12 net profit for every US$100 you spent if you had followed that path.
We examined more than 300 markets on Polymarket pertaining to actions directly initiated by Trump this year, between Inauguration Day and Sept. 30. That analysis included everything from tariffs to whether he would fire a Cabinet official to what executive orders he would sign. Gamblers even wagered on his golf game and the duration of Elon Musk’s White House tenure. On the day each market opened, bettors assigned an average probability of 34 percent to those events occurring within a specified timeframe. However, only 28 percent actually happened.
While a sophisticated forecaster could have devised a complex betting scheme to exploit this, a simple rule would have also made you money: Always bet “no.” Betting against Trump taking any action would have translated to a 12 percent return — similar to the S&P 500’s gain over the same period. Consistently betting yes would have cost you 20 percent of your money.
Prediction markets promise to harness the wisdom of crowds to provide a more reliable signal about the probability of events. Last year, Polymarket saw a surge of trading on the US presidential election that culminated with a French gambler making more than US$85 million betting on Trump’s victory. Analysis shows that crowds systematically overestimate the likelihood of many political events — especially when it comes to predicting the president’s next moves.
Trump has spent most of his 79 years assiduously courting the media and spouting dross along the way. His actions were typically inspired by self-aggrandizement or self-preservation. Anyone watching his business and entertainment careers, or his nonstop tour as a public curiosity, during that time could have anticipated the pattern continuing into the White House. He has always talked the talk, but has not always walked the walk. Minding that reality might give observers a psychological cushion. It would also make gamblers a little bit of money.
If you began betting against Trump in June, you would have done even better, earning a 19 percent return. These payouts suggest that most bettors on prediction markets are still overestimating the likelihood that Trump follows through.
Personal biases or magical thinking can afflict every investor. It is the bane of gamblers. We sorted the markets on Trump into five categories and found that the initial probabilities assigned by Polymarket users were consistently higher than the percentage of events that happened. In other words, overestimating how often Trump acts was not limited to a particular domain or policy area — though betting no on tariff or trade events and domestic policies would have yielded the largest returns.
Our analysis excludes shorter-term markets — those set to resolve within two weeks of opening — because they capture more obvious events with less baked-in uncertainty. Is Trump deploying Marines to Los Angeles protests by Friday? Is Trump releasing the Kennedy assassination files by Wednesday? For 93 markets of this type, it was wise to hold on to your money. Betting that Trump would have acted would have dinged you 3 percent. Wagering that he would not have acted would have cost you 13 percent of your funds. It is harder to game the odds in those cases because prediction markets are more accurate for short-term outcomes.
Our analysis of wagers on Trump’s tariff policy is limited to a new levy being imposed or going into effect. We chose that route because it eliminates statistical noise caused by analyzing wagers on whether Trump would reduce or remove tariffs between their announcement and implementation. Indeed, Trump’s propensity for walking back the details of his tariff proposals spawned an acronym coined by Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong: TACO, or “Trump Always Chickens Out.”
Of course Trump has not just been all talk in his second term. He played a leading role in brokering a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. His tariff and immigration policies are very real. So are his abuses of the legal system and presidential powers.
It is also important to keep paying attention to some of the particulars of what Trump says, because it is common for all of us to disengage when we are mired in too much information we cannot effectively process. It is a phenomenon known as cognitive overload.
Trump recently gave a 73-minute speech to a gathering of the nation’s top military officers in Quantico, Virginia. He touched on everything from his dining preferences and his desire for a Nobel Peace Prize to what he described as Joe Biden’s corruption and his ongoing concerns about border security. These are familiar themes, but if you tuned out you would have missed something Trump said about 44 minutes into his performance: He advocated using US cities as training grounds for the military. Prediction markets have yet to fully weigh in on whether Trump might deploy troops domestically, though bets are being placed on a shortlist of cities where the National Guard might be sent next.
That is a reminder that betting markets can be useful barometers of enormously consequential events. In more than 300 markets we examined, Trump did take action more than 80 times. Many of those events involved decisions that tested or exceeded the boundaries of presidential powers, including his attempts to ban birthright citizenship, justify deportations using the Alien Enemies Act and cut federal funding for universities.
When it comes to Trump, we are dealing with an inherently unpredictable and often unreliable actor determined to keep everyone guessing. So you are better off — financially and emotionally — betting that he is not going to do most of the stuff he says. And that might give you breathing room to focus on the things he says that really matter.
METHODOLOGY
We identified an initial set of events on Polymarket by searching for Trump via the public search API . We limited our analysis to markets since Trump’s second election, those that opened after Nov. 6 and resolved between Inauguration Day and Sept. 30, and to events with a binary yes or no outcome.
We then manually reviewed the candidate markets and selected those that pertained to an action directly initiated by Trump. The following types of markets were excluded: those that were set to resolve within two weeks of opening; dependent on Congressional action; initiated by an agency head; and pertaining to tariffs being reduced or removed. To focus more on meaningful political or personal actions, we also excluded markets concerning Trump saying a word, attending an event, visiting a place or meeting with a person. This resulted in a final sample of 310 markets. As a comparison group, we identified a set of 372 markets tagged as politics or geopolitics, but not Trump on Polymarket following a similar process.
Carolyn Silverman is a data journalist for Bloomberg Opinion. She previously served as a data scientist for the University of Chicago Crime Lab and Education Lab. Timothy L. O’Brien is senior executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion. A former editor and reporter for the New York Times, he is author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.” This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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