Many people think that quantitative trading is just Wall Street's bloodsucker, with cold algorithmic robots relying on millisecond speeds to continuously siphon blood from retail investors' misjudged emotions and informational gaps.

But something interesting happened in the last 48 hours—the profit curves of several top quantitative robots in the prediction market collectively collapsed, while a mysterious account called a4385 made a whopping $280,000 in profit.

This is not just a trading story; it feels more like a carefully orchestrated ambush targeting quantitative robots.

**Prediction Market: A Testing Ground for Quantitative Models**

The concept of prediction markets is quite simple. For example, you bet "up" on a market predicting whether gold prices will rise or fall tomorrow. If the gold price indeed rises the next day, you profit based on the odds at the time of your bet. The odds themselves reflect the market's pricing of the event's probability. Conversely, if the price falls, your position is immediately wiped out.

The XRP 15-minute price movement chart is a typical example of such a market. Each 15-minute window starts with an initial price; after 15 minutes, if XRP's price is higher than the starting price, the bullish traders win; if it drops, the bearish side laughs last.

This zero-sum mechanism should theoretically be a paradise for quantitative models—ample data, frequent trading, dense opportunities. But this event shows that sometimes, hunters can also become prey.