This is true. I ran a 3+ Sharpe and over 40% annualized strategy on PredictIt back when they had the tweet markets a few years ago. It was literally just fitting a Poisson model to Trump, Pence, White House, POTUS, and VP twitter accounts and then Kelly betting based on the difference between the market price and the Poisson model.
I strongly believe the only reason I got such a solid performance is not because I’m some kind of trading savant, but simply that the $850 per contract limit prevents smart money/institutional traders from moving the market towards efficiency.
Similar opportunities exist in the equity world — one huge advantage is that little guys don’t really incur market impact.
For a lot of systematic RV plays, you might only have 10bps alpha and then a 7bp trading cost each way.