How did pizza orders outside the Pentagon become the "secret to wealth" for Polymarket traders?

A clever crypto trader kicked off their 2026 earning journey in the most unconventional way. This user named Sweetcheeks on X shared his trading secret: by real-time tracking order data from Domino’s Pizza stores around the Pentagon, he accurately identified a key geopolitical event window and invested heavily on the Polymarket prediction platform, earning $80,000 in a single night. Behind this story is a deep understanding of alternative data and market mechanisms.

“Unconventional Intelligence” Behind Pizza Orders

Traditional traders rely on financial data, technical analysis, and macro policies for decision-making. But Sweetcheeks chose a completely different path—he built a “pizza monitoring robot” that tracks the order frequency of major fast-food chains near the Pentagon 24/7. Its core logic seems simple but is surprisingly accurate: late-night large orders often indicate military personnel working overtime, and large-scale overtime usually signals an imminent major military action.

In early 2026, when this system detected an abnormal surge in Domino’s Pizza orders near the Pentagon, Sweetcheeks keenly realized that the U.S. might be preparing for military action against Venezuela.

From Anomalous Signal to Contract Betting

After discovering this information gap that the market hadn’t fully reacted to, he quickly turned to Polymarket, a decentralized prediction market. On this platform, traders can bet on the probability of various geopolitical and economic events. Sweetcheeks bought a large amount of prediction contracts related to “Will the U.S. attack Venezuela,” betting on the likelihood of this event occurring.

On the evening of January 4th, his judgment was validated. The development of the event closely matched his prediction, and this contract position yielded $80,000 in profit in just one night. From signal detection to executing trades and exiting profitably, the entire process took only a few hours.

Insights from the Era of Alternative Data

This case reflects an important trend in contemporary crypto markets and prediction trading: traditional intelligence and conventional data sources are becoming crowded, and real profit opportunities often hide in “unexpected” streams of information. Pizza orders outside the Pentagon, sentiment indices on Twitter, on-chain fund flows—these alternative data are changing the decision-making methods of savvy traders.

Sweetcheeks’s success was not luck but a perfect illustration of data-driven trading philosophy. He used technical means to capture “weak signals” around the Pentagon, transforming them into tradable opportunities on the transparent prediction platform Polymarket, ultimately locking in profits before information asymmetry disappeared. The core competitiveness of this strategy lies in the ability to identify and leverage those pieces of information that the mainstream market has not yet fully priced in.