---
title: 'How to Trade on Polymarket (Complete Beginner Guide)'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=f0fLy5DhcYY'
video_id: 'f0fLy5DhcYY'
date: 2026-08-01
duration_sec: 1055
---

# How to Trade on Polymarket (Complete Beginner Guide)

> Source: [How to Trade on Polymarket (Complete Beginner Guide)](https://youtube.com/watch?v=f0fLy5DhcYY)

## Summary

This beginner guide to Polymarket explains how prediction markets work, how to fund and trade on the platform, and how share pricing compares to traditional sports betting. CryptoGorilla walks through live trades, order book mechanics, and the potential for a token airdrop while warning about liquidity and market manipulation risks.

### Key Points

- **Prediction markets as new frontier** [00:01] — Polymarket and similar platforms let anyone bet on future events such as elections, product launches, court cases, and celebrity scandals, enabling profits from correct predictions.
- **What is Polymarket?** [00:44] — A prediction market marketplace where users buy shares representing yes or no for future event outcomes, such as sports, politics, tech, and culture.
- **Hyper-gamification of life** [01:09] — The platform turns nearly any event into a tradable market, including GTA 6 trailer releases, alien confirmations, and even whether Jesus returns in 2025.
- **No KYC, US availability soon** [02:23] — Polymarket is a decentralized exchange with no KYC, currently unavailable in the US, but a market predicts 92% chance of US launch in 2025.
- **Deposit options** [02:52] — Users can deposit via credit card (often unreliable) or cryptocurrency using a decentralized wallet like MetaMask or Phantom on Polygon.
- **Shares vs fixed odds** [03:31] — Unlike traditional sports betting with fixed bookmaker odds, Polymarket uses yes/no shares priced between $0 and $1, varying with information flow.
- **Share pricing example** [05:07] — A 50 bps decrease market shows 3% chance: yes share at 2.6 cents, no share at 97.12 cents. If yes, each share pays $1.
- **Exit before resolution** [06:39] — Traders can sell shares before the event resolves, capitalizing on price swings from news like Fed announcements, without waiting for final outcome.
- **Live trade demo** [08:10] — CryptoGorilla buys $5 of 'GTA 6 trailer in 2025' yes shares at 31 cents, receiving ~16 shares, showing the purchase and confirmation process.
- **Order book importance** [09:52] — Market orders fill at best available bid, not the displayed last price. Low liquidity can force selling at a loss or cause poor average fills.
- **Limit orders and rewards** [11:57] — Placing limit orders within the spread provides liquidity and earns rewards (like 4% APY), but is risky if the market moves sharply while away.
- **Onchain transparency and risks** [13:50] — Polymarket's onchain data lets anyone track and copy trade whale wallets, but also enables insider manipulation, as shown by CEOs betting on their own earnings call words.

### Conclusion

Polymarket is a decentralized prediction market that rewards traders who correctly anticipate future events. The guide emphasizes that the real edge comes from information flow, risk management, and understanding liquidity — not just picking winners.

## Transcript

into profit? And I'm not just talking sports, but elections, product launches, court cases, celebrity scandals, and even the fate of nations. This is the new frontier of trading. Platforms like Poly Market let anyone put their money
where their conviction is and profit on being right about the future. Ladies and CryptoGorilla video. Today, I want to talk about Poly Market, who have just confirmed they will have a token. So many people are expecting a token
airdrop. As usual, I am not a financial adviser. These platforms are risky. You have to bet money so you could lose money. Also, I have zero control over going to get a token airdrop, none of that. I'm just showing you how this
hit the like button. It really helps my videos reach a wider audience. And let's jump right into it. So, Poly Market is a prediction market, meaning it's a marketplace that allows you to make
predictions on the outcome of events happening in the future. And if you're most people are used to doing this with gambling, who will win the Super Bowl, or how many corner kicks are going to
happen before halftime. And sports betting is actually available on Poly Market. However, this is the hyper financialization or hyper gamification of our entire lives because you could literally bet on anything from politics,
so who's going to win a certain election or if nuclear weapons are going to go or if nuclear weapons are going to go off in 2025. You could bet on tech, so when certain products are going to release by, when the sale of Tik Tok's
going to be announced, if Tesla is going to release full self-driving cars by a certain date. You can even bet on culture. So, who is going to be the top Spotify artist of the year? What's going to happen before GTA 6? Is Jesus going
to return in 2025? Are we going to confirm aliens in 2025? There are an bet on, as ridiculous as some of those might seem. And this is why I really like the platform because one, there is always something that you could bet on.
And two, there is a market for everyone. Maybe you're not the biggest sports fan, so you could never bet on sports in the past, but perhaps you have an interest in politics. Maybe you really understand tech or music or movies. Whatever it is,
you might have an edge in one of these markets. So, how can you use this platform? Well, Poly Market is a decentralized exchange, meaning there is no KYC. You don't have to prove your identity. It's currently not available
in America. However, that is supposed to change really soon. In fact, there's a market for this which is currently at a 92% chance that it will go live in the US in 2025, which is actually something they've announced. They're just waiting
for the US government to get its act together and allow it to operate in America. So, you have two options to make deposits. You can use a credit card. Personally, this never works for me. I assume it's because of my region.
Also, I'm just like a crypto native, so I always opt for the crypto option. You are going to need a decentralized wallet like MetaMask or Phantom. Luckily, I have tutorials for both. I will link those in the description down below.
to need to deposit funds. It's on Polygon, but it's going to do the conversion for you. So, make whatever deposit you want. And then you should see a cash position on top, which means you are ready to start trading. Now,
with traditional sports betting, you are buying fixed odds that are set by a book maker and you're betting against the house. So, in America, you're probably house. So, in America, you're probably used to seeing minus 110 or plus 250 as
the odds that you're buying. On prediction markets, you are buying prediction markets, you are buying shares represented by a yes or a no of a specific event happening. Now, these shares are represented by a price and
the price is variable. It can be anywhere from $0 all the way to $1. And as new information comes in, the price is going to change over time, which is
represented here by this chart. You can see how much these prices swing. So you can treat this like trading crypto or stocks where it can be day traded, it can be swing traded because these markets are dependent on information. As
new information comes in, the prices are going to change. But that also means if you plan on doing this, you need to pay hyper attention to these markets because they are very dependent on global news coming in. They are dependent on
individuals. If you are betting on when the government shutdown is going to end, a single tweet from Trump or somebody in the government can completely shift these odds, which is exactly what we saw happen yesterday after a tweet came in
about the government shutdown. And you can see here the odds completely change directions. So let's talk about how these shares work and then I'm going to show you how to make a trade. Now shares are going to constantly have a price.
The prices are variable so they're always changing. Let's use uh the 50 basis point decrease just as an example. Okay? I'm not telling you to go buy yes or no for this. Currently it's at a 3% chance of happening. So odds are very
low. So, the yes option is going to be much cheaper than buying the no option. Now, a single yes share is going to be 2.6 if it results as yes, which every bet has an expiry date. This one is expiring
on December 10th. So, by December 10th, if it results as yes and I bought in at if it results as yes and I bought in at 2.6, my 2.6 cents is going to be worth a dollar. So, for every share I purchased at 2.6, 6, I'm going to make 97.4
profit. On the other end, if I wanted to be less risky, which it's still risky, anything can happen, but because of the low odds, the market is assuming that a lot more expensive to buy these shares. It is currently at 97 12. And if
it results as yes, it's going to go to a dollar. So, the spread that I can make dollar. So, the spread that I can make is 2.5 cents per share. So, just to illustrate this for you, let's put a $100 bet. If I win with yes, it's going
to be $3,687 profit. However, if I do no and I put profit. However, if I do no and I put $100, if I win, I'm only winning $2.56 profit. So, I'm risking a h 100red bucks to make $2.56
versus yes, I'm risking a h 100red bucks to make $3,587 profit, but the odds of that happening are very low according to the market. However, the cool thing here, unlike sports betting, I do not need to wait
sports betting, I do not need to wait until this resolves on December 10th in order to make money. Let's pretend I were to buy $10 of Yes shares for a 50 basis point increase and then tomorrow Jerome Pal makes an announcement saying,
"You know what? We might need to do a larger decrease closer to 50 basis points. These shares are going to shoot up. These are going to go to 40, 50, 60, 70 cents per share. You're going to see it on the graph here just shoot up. And
because I'm an owner of those shares, my $10 is now going to be worth like $250, $300. And because this is a peer-to-peer market, as long as there is a buyer, I am able to dump those shares before the
event resolves. So even if I buy 50 basis point shares, if this goes up and it ends up being wrong, as long as I sold and got out, I don't care. I already made my profit. And that is the new landscape of trading prediction
different from traditional sports betting. And this is a whole new world that is super exciting because you're not trading the actual result. You are just trading information available at that time and future information. So,
let's take a trade just so you can actually see how this works. Let's do a fun one. Uh, is GTA 6 going to release a trailer in 2025? I'm just going to bet yes cuz I hope they do. Uh let's pretend I want to bet $5 on this happening. So a
share price is currently 31 per share. So for $5 I'm going to get roughly 16 shares. And if I'm correct, if it results as yes, I'm going to make $16.13
total. So roughly $11 profit. So I'm going to go ahead and click buy. Yes. It is going to pull up my wallet. I'm going to have to sign a transaction. Confirm. And you can see I have purchased some shares. So now if I go to my profile, I
should see right here under positions, I currently have 16.1 shares of GTA resulting in yes at an average price of 31 cents. I'm down a little bit uh also due to fees and stuff. And then if I go to activity, I'm going to see my
activity. So I just purchased this. This is where you get the transaction and see all the information if you want to follow along. Now, let's go ahead and close it just so you can see what that's like. I would click on sell right here.
I want to sell my yes shares. However, you'll notice that it's currently at 28. I just bought it for 31 cents and it's still at 31. So, why when I sell am I
still at 31. So, why when I sell am I getting a 28 cents fill? That is because you need to look at the order book. These are, you know, sometimes very against other people. So, it's other people who need to put up the buy
orders. Right? Right now, I was doing a market order. I you can also do limit orders if you want to get out at a certain price. But if I want to get out right away, there needs to be a willing buyer on the other end of that
transaction. And if we go look, the highest somebody is willing to buy my shares for is 28 cents. and he's only willing to spend $34.72
total. So, if I had $1,000 that I needed to offload here, I'd have to go pretty low all the way down to like 22 cents in order to exit my entire position. So, this is something you always need to keep in mind, right? Let's just do buy a
mock transaction here. If I want to spend $7,000 on this, even though it looks like it's a three over a 3x, if I'm correct, I'm currently getting less than a 2x. A 2x would be $14,000, but I'm only getting 11,000 if I'm correct.
That is because my average price is at roughly 34 because there's not enough people willing to sell me yes shares. So, the order book is very important to look at, as is liquidity. You want to look how much volume there is on the
market you are trading. Some of these markets are extremely illquid. Let's just look here. there's only $200 of volume that Trump is going to say F-35 on the next uh on his next meeting or or during the next week. So, if I want to
bet, you know, $1,000, my average price fill is at a hundred. It's at $1. Like, it's not worth me even spending a,000 bucks here because I'm not going to get a I'm actually going to lose money if I'm correct because there's really
there's not enough people that are willing to sell me these shares. So, you always always need to be checking the order book and being careful that you're going to give you a warning if this happens, but this is something you need
sell to show you what it is. So, I'm taking a 49cent loss for you guys. Uh, so to sell, I would just click yes, sign, confirm, and voila, my shares are sold. You can see my history right here, and I no longer hold these shares. Now,
orders. So, limit orders, I would just click limit. I can put, you know, how many shares I want to buy? A thousand at uh at 19 cents. So, I'm gonna open this I don't want to spend all this money at 9 cents. I would do oop I'm doing sell.
That's why. Uh let's do buy here. I want to buy 1,000 shares at 9 cents. I would do buy. Yes, I would place my limit order. And now, if we go to the order book, I might have to refresh. Let's scroll. Okay, right here. These are my
shares. You can see zero of a thousand filled. I have my shares open here and I am now providing liquidity to this market. If we go right here, you'll notice there's a rewards section and I'm not within the spread because the
spread, you can see it says max spread roughly 3 cents. So, I'm not going to be earning any money. But if we go to my account, you can see I did earn some here. I got 4% rewards. I was given 2 cents for having uh some limit orders
that you're doing this with, which I I recommend like 99% of people not to do this for rewards. If you want to do limit orders to trade, fine. But, uh, it's very risky. If something happens,
And if the market nukes, you're not home, you're you're just going to get should not do this. There's a lot of sophisticated traders doing this, but this is how you make rewards. And I'm assuming here that this is one of the
airdrop. Were you providing liquidity? How much did you earn in rewards? Providing liquidity on top of the the normal thing being, you know, how much did you trade? How many trades did you make? And especially, what is your
trading volume? I think that's the main metric that they're going to look at. What is your trading volume on our platform? Now, there are a ton of prediction markets out there. The biggest one right now is Kalshi, but it
is a centralized platform. So, you have to do KYC. You have to give your country, so I can't even use it. But what I love about Poly Market is it is entirely onchain, meaning all the information about trades, about traders
information about trades, about traders is all public. I am able to find traders aping in to stuff and track them. I can copy trade them. I could see exactly strategy. Maybe they have an edge in sports betting or in politics and I can
keep an eye on their wallet to see what they're doing, which personally I find that is a beautiful thing with onchain data. Now, because this is an information game, there's also a dark side to it because there are going to be
people using inside information to do this stuff. We're seeing brand new whale that's untraceable because it's from a centralized exchange and they are aping, shouldn't be aping. and then the result comes out like, "Oh, this was actually
true and they made a lot of money." That was more likely than not insider information. And you know, this is going to happen anywhere that there's money. We see in uh we just saw in basketball, there was a ton of scandals that just
came out, which is perfectly normal. However, this is on a whole new level because there are people involved here, right? There's things on like when is a somebody going to be announce a pregnancy? You know, people who are
close to their lives can easily rig this. Look, how many tweets is Elon going to do in November? Like Elon can I I doubt he would do it, but he can easily come bet on himself and just tweet a bunch or stop tweeting, right,
and get a a 50x or a 100x. Same thing goes for mention markets. To me, this is the easiest to rig. What is a sports announcer going to say during the next announcer going to say during the next game? Or what is uh the CEO going to say
there's a bunch of words that you could bet yes and no on. This is so easy to just come read this list, bet on a ton of stuff, and then, you know, say crisis, say green, footing, or not say any of them. The ones that are likely to
hit, you don't say them. And that's even less suspicious, right? If you're saying But there's no laws against this stuff even if you did it. And if you think like CEOs and stuff are not paying attention to this, we just had Brian
Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, literally open a prediction market during the earnings call, which is recorded, it's public, and he read the entire list of words, and they all resulted in yes, people made and lost
millions of dollars, and there's no laws against this. So, I find this stuff super cool. This is not a trend. This is the future of betting. Like, this is not going away. Our society is becoming more and more hyper gambalized, right? We bet
on like opening toy boxes and stuff. It starts at very young ages where where we open Pokemon cards as kids and you get that dopamine rush. So people are going kind of stuff. It's dangerous. Like you got to be careful. But if you have an
edge somewhere, if you're smart, if you're using the right tools, especially AI tools, AI is going to be so much better at making predictions than humans that you can get an edge. So, I really like these tools and to me this is super
interesting, give this video a thumbs up. Hit that subscribe button if you haven't already done so. I got a ton of tutorials coming out. Thank you for watching another Cryptogorilla video. Peace. [music]