Last Updated: 2026-10-25
Risk warning: These are constructed arithmetic examples, not financial advice, tested trades or return forecasts. Trading can lose the entire stake.
Providing a resting quote exposes you to being filled when someone else prefers the other side. A reward payment is one cash-flow item, not proof that the activity was profitable. The former personal APR story and unsupported pool/token-reward claims are removed.
The official liquidity-reward documentation, checked October 25, 2026, describes resting-order incentives and per-market size, spread and allocation settings. A listed market can have no active reward configuration. Inspect the current configuration and reward asset; do not infer eligibility or a payout from a headline allocation.
A two-sided quote can become one-sided inventory
In a fictional market you bid $0.48 and ask $0.52 for YES. Someone selling to your bid makes you the buyer; someone buying your ask makes you the seller. Suppose 100 shares fill at your $0.48 bid, then new information lowers the executable bid to $0.30. Liquidating those shares returns $30 against a $48 purchase: an $18 loss before costs.
If you also received a $2 reward, the combined result is still −$16 before other charges. The four-cent quoted spread was never earned on a completed buy-and-sell pair. A midpoint mark can hide a worse exit price, so state the valuation method.
Keep a ledger with five separate lines
- Cash spent and received on fills, with actual quantities and timestamps.
- Remaining YES/NO inventory, marked at a declared price and depth.
- Rewards actually received, separated by asset and conversion rate.
- Fees, transfers and infrastructure expenses.
- External deposits and withdrawals, which are not trading profit.
Reconcile opening equity plus external flows plus net result to closing equity. Do not add reward tokens at an assumed dollar value, or treat open position value as profit. If a contract is unresolved, keep its position visible rather than reporting only closed wins.
Two arithmetic checks before quoting a yield
$0.35–$0.55 per day on $1,000 is $127.75–$200.75 over 365 days, or 12.775–20.075% simple annualized, if every day were identical. It is not a forecast, and trading losses and costs still belong in the numerator.
$1,535 on $5,000 over 14 months is 30.7% total, not 30.7% annual. With no intermediate cash flows, simple annualization is 26.31%; compound annualization is about 25.80%. Neither establishes what the next year will earn. Use time- or money-weighted methods when external flows make a simple ratio misleading.
Stop conditions for a paper study
Define maximum inventory, stale-quote age, unresolved order states and loss limits before evaluating quotes. A cancellation timeout is not confirmation that the order disappeared. Track how often adverse moves follow fills, rather than assuming every execution captures spread. Rewards, maker rebates and trading P&L should remain separate in the report.
This guide provides a bookkeeping and risk framework. It does not set a target APR, recommend a capital allocation or describe lending yields as guaranteed.
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