Faith and Markets: Why I Trade with Conviction

Christianity is the original contrarian bet. Two thousand years ago, betting on a crucified rabbi from Galilee being the savior of humanity was the least likely trade in history. The consensus was overwhelmingly against it. The insiders — the religious establishment, the political authorities — were on the other side.

The people who took that bet changed the world. I think about that when I'm sitting on a prediction market position that everyone else thinks is crazy. The crowd being confident against you is not evidence you're wrong.

A lot of people are paralyzed by uncertainty. They won't take a position — in markets or in life — unless they're close to certain. That's not caution; that's a failure to understand how uncertainty works.

Faith lives in the space between certainty and nothing. You act not because you know the outcome but because you have conviction about what's true and you're willing to be accountable to that conviction. That's exactly what trading is. You can't be certain. You act anyway. You take responsibility for the outcome.

Christian teaching on stewardship — the idea that what you have is entrusted to you, not ultimately owned by you — completely changes how I think about money and risk. I'm not protecting 'my' money; I'm managing resources responsibly on behalf of something larger.

This removes a lot of the ego from trading. A loss isn't an attack on my identity. A win isn't validation of my worth. Both are just feedback about the quality of my decisions. That emotional distance from outcomes is one of the most valuable things faith gave me as a trader.

The best trades I've ever made were the ones where I had strong conviction with acknowledged uncertainty. I knew I could be wrong. I took the position anyway because the expected value was clearly positive given my thesis. I sized appropriately for the uncertainty.

That's faith operationalized. Not certainty — conviction. Not knowing — trusting. The distinction matters enormously in both spiritual life and in markets.

I get asked whether prediction markets are ethical — am I profiting from bad events? This is worth taking seriously. My answer: prediction markets generate information. That information helps society make better decisions. A market that accurately prices the probability of a hurricane doesn't cause hurricanes; it helps people prepare for them.

From a Christian ethics standpoint, accurate information serving accurate decision-making is a good. The honest testimony is the righteous testimony. Prediction markets enforce honesty about probabilities in a way that nothing else does.

I don't pray for winning trades. I pray for wisdom, good judgment, and integrity in how I build things. I pray for the users of PolyFire — that the tools I build help them make better decisions, not just more impulsive ones.

The work matters beyond the P&L. Building infrastructure for better information markets is, I genuinely believe, a good thing to put your life toward. That conviction comes from somewhere. For me, that somewhere is faith.