This line's cause of death is highly transferable: I copied a wallet that was performing well, and by the time I took it apart it had already stopped working. Tuition: about $210 — the cheapest lesson on this site, and the rule it produced was applied to every line afterwards.
Weather offers an appealing combination: the reward pool is real (paid on-chain at a fixed daily time, publicly verifiable) and the category's participants are relatively unsophisticated. So "post quotes and collect liquidity rewards" looks like a viable business.
I found a wallet performing well at the time, took its approach apart, and built a line copying it.
| Stage | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1 | hard stop triggered on day one |
| 2 | redesigned, ran again |
| 3 | stopped early |
| 4 | replay returned FAIL → archived |
Stage 4 is worth noting: a replay was run after the line stopped. "It lost money live" and "the method does not work" are different claims — live losses can come from execution, timing or luck. Only a failing replay licenses "this road is closed".
When I took it apart I was reading its past results. Neither leaderboards nor historical records tell you whether an approach still works today. July's star was no longer valid in August.
This was not an execution problem or bad luck — it was a question I omitted at the verification stage: "is it still making money now?"
Expanded in leaderboards are lagging indicators.
| Conclusion | |
|---|---|
| The pool | real. Paid daily, enumerable on-chain |
| Ladder arbitrage | not real. See below |
The common weather shape is a temperature ladder: a day's high cut into a dozen mutually exclusive, exhaustive bands — exactly one must be true, so the prices sum to $1.
Which makes "they add to 0.96, buy the set for four free cents" look obvious. I checked it, and it does not hold — falsified twice, independently.
The core tension is in the scoring formula: rewards are scored on distance from mid, with quadratic decay and zero beyond the board's maximum spread — the programme is built to buy tight quotes.
| Quoting at | Reward | Bad-fill $ |
|---|---|---|
| join best | ×1 | ×1 |
| −2¢ | ×0.26 | ×0.29 |
So "quote deeper, stay safe, still collect" is structurally impossible: the safety is genuine, and you are paying three-quarters of the reward for it. Netting those two is the only way to know whether it pays — see LP rewards.
| Rule | From |
|---|---|
| Before copying, ask "is it still making money now?" | the primary cause of death |
| Replay after stopping; do not conclude from live results alone | stage 4 |
| Size subsidy-dependent strategies as if the subsidy could be zero | it was 100% dependent on the pool |
| A real pool is not your share of it | split by score; more participants, less each |
This line did not die of "wrong method". It died of "I verified the method and not whether it still works." What $210 bought was one sentence: before copying an approach, confirm it is still alive.