From a blank server
to a running bot

Any provider works — Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Vultr. The smallest box is enough.

Choose the region deliberately. Polymarket refuses orders from some countries and says so before it looks at the order — a server in a restricted region cannot trade live, whatever else is correct. Paper mode works anywhere.

Two regions we have measured ourselves, by sending real orders rather than by reading a list: Singapore is refused and Indonesia is accepted. Singapore is a common default on Asian providers, so it is worth checking rather than accepting.

We do not publish a full list. Ours would be the two above plus guesses, and a wrong entry costs you a server. Polymarket's own terms are the source; if your region turns out to be refused, the runner says so by name on the first live order and paper keeps working meanwhile.

Ubuntu's own package is too old. This is the official installer.

The same token that reads the signal fetches the code: no registry account, no deploy key, and one place to revoke. Paste yours in place of $TOKEN.

ps shows command arguments to every user on the box, and your shell keeps them in history. The runner refuses to start if either file is readable by anyone but you.

Paper is the default and cannot be configured away. Nothing reaches the exchange; the gate runs and every window is recorded.

Ctrl-C when you have seen a few. It all lands in ~/.ramalogy/history.db, and npm start -- --history reads it back — declined windows included, because a record of only the trades taken cannot say whether the skips would have won.

An SSH session ends when you close the laptop. systemd does not.

Do not add Nice= or IOSchedulingClass=idle to that file. Throttling this process delays its heartbeat enough that the feed stops streaming while the process stays up and every health check still passes.

Only when you want real orders. Deposit into Polymarket once through their own flow — that creates the deposit wallet, which is the only kind of maker the exchange accepts.

Check the printed address against the one Polymarket shows you before sending anything to it. It is derived from your key, not read from your account — if the two disagree, stop and ask rather than editing the file to match.

Pick a level, check the size it produces, copy the command. The confirmation phrase is required on every run, not once.

Live mode reads your wallet balance at startup and refuses to start if the bankroll you claim is larger than what you hold. --bankroll auto takes the balance instead of a number that stops being true.

Read the measured results before this step. The strategy did not beat the market in testing: the out-of-sample log score is worse than the market's, its confidence interval excludes zero, and the pre-registered evaluation expects a stop. Start with an amount you would not mind losing entirely.

By default the runner takes the ask the moment the gate fires. --limit-offset rests a buy below it instead, in dollars. It was measured against taking the ask on 372 windows before it was built, and it lost: net −0.046 per dollar staked, CI [−0.062, −0.032]. At 30c below the ask the fills win 39%.

Waiting does not buy a better price on the same bet — it sorts the bets. You get filled at a discount on the windows turning against you, and are left chasing the ones turning your way. The flag exists because it was asked for, not because the evidence supports it; the runner logs limit-offset.measured-worse on every run that sets it. A resting order is also cancelled when its window closes, and needs 5 shares rather than $1 — the share floor binds a resting order even though it does not bind a taker.