The Largely Preventable Polymarket Wars: Long Position

A review of a non-existent book

The Largely Preventable Polymarket Wars: Long Position Derek Osman Meridian Press | 2023 | 487pp Book Two of the Largely Preventable Polymarket Wars Cycle

Cara Voss said she was done with the exchanges after Palmerston North. And meant it. Then the São Paulo Sigma Collective shorted the continued existence of a Canada-Denmark fisheries agreement, first ratified in 1987, and everything changed.

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Review

★★★★ Osman has once again written a prediction market thriller in which the most dangerous weapon is a correctly interpreted confidence interval.

Readers of The Largely Preventable Polymarket Wars: Short Squeeze will arrive knowing what Osman expects of them, and Long Position immediately subverts those expectations with an unhinged glee. Gone are the terse geopolitical set pieces and the extensively footnoted antagonists that so defined the original, and the operational recklessness and sleazy wit that the character of Cara Voss brought to the first book is now replaced with a grim and mathematically robust fealty to Black-Scholes.

Cara remains a robust creation, though a diminished one - Osman is too dogged a writer to pretend that the events of Palmerston North didn’t happen, and, for several overly florid chapters, the novel tries to be quietly devastating on the subject of what a fully hedged market truly costs. But the arbitrage sequences are once again undeniably compelling, propelling the book to its actuarially sound climax. Osman remains the only novelist working today who can make a margin call materially frightening.

The villains are the novel’s one weakness - their motives, when finally revealed, turn on a grudge against the Canadian cod industry that strains credibility even by the standards of a novel in which the climactic confrontation is largely conducted via a series of spreadsheet macros.

Osman sticks the landing regardless. A serious, foul-mouthed, internally coherent achievement. The outlook for Book Three has never been more bullish.

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About the Author

Derek Osman spent eleven years as a derivatives trader before self-publishing his ill-formatted debut novella The Unknown Variance, which won him a prestigious Wendell™ award. He lives in Calgary and refuses to budge on the matter.

Who Is This Book For?

Readers who found Cara ‘too uppity’ in The Largely Preventable Polymarket Wars: Short Squeeze, or fans of Justine Morrow’s The Blockchain Prophecies quadrology.