How we read the markets
A price is only news if you can trust it. These are the rules every number on this site goes through.
Where the numbers come from
Every price is from Polymarket, a prediction market where people trade on real outcomes. We read it once a minute through Polymarket's public data and store every reading. You never load anything from Polymarket when you visit us. Each page links to the markets it uses.
A price of 63% means traders, on balance, are paying 63 cents for a contract that pays a dollar if the thing happens. It isn't a poll and it isn't our forecast.
Which price we show
When buyers and sellers are within 5 points of each other, we show the midpoint between them. When the gap is wider, we show the last traded price and mark the quote as wide.
What we leave out
- Stale quotes. If the gap between buyers and sellers is over 20 points, nobody is really trading that outcome. We drop it and say so on the page.
- Placeholders. Markets list empty slots like "Person A" for candidates who might appear later. We never show them.
- Prices below 0.1% with nobody bidding.
Thin markets
A market with under $25K traded is marked thin. One large order can move it, so we never lead a story with one.
When we call something a move
We flag a market when it moves 5 points in an hour or 10 points in a day, and only if more than $50K has traded on it. A market settling at 100% is a result, not a move. See the moves.
Adding up to more than 100%
Prices in a market with several outcomes usually add up to slightly more than 100%. That extra is the overround. When we compare two markets, we strip it out first, and the page says by how much.
The words we use
A price moving after a news event doesn't prove the event moved it. We write "after" or "within minutes of". We only write "because" when a named source says so, and we link the source.
Context written by a person carries the date it was written. Live numbers update every minute, so the two can drift apart, and the date tells you which is which.
When prices stop updating
If we can't reach a market, the page keeps the last good price and the header turns from the green dot to "Delayed" once a price is over 10 minutes old.
Which markets we cover
Some races we follow by hand, with their own pages. The rest we find automatically: every few minutes we take Polymarket's busiest markets in politics, world affairs, the economy, tech, crypto, sports and the weather. A market needs more than $1.0M traded to get a page. We skip single games, tweet counts and same-day price ladders, which are betting, not news.
Headlines
We read the public RSS feeds of outlets including the BBC, The New York Times, DW, CNBC, The Guardian, Al Jazeera and NPR, plus regional desks: The Standard, News24, Africanews and Premium Times for Africa; the South China Morning Post, The Hindu, Dawn, CNA and Nikkei Asia for Asia; Arab News for the Middle East; MercoPress and the Buenos Aires Times for Latin America; Politico Europe and Euronews for Europe. We show the headline, the outlet, the time and a link to the original. We never copy the article.
A headline is put next to a market when it names the people, places or subjects the market is about. That means the two are related. It doesn't mean the news moved the price.
Automatic stories
When a market crosses our move threshold, we publish a short brief: what moved, by how much, and whether a matching headline came out in the 90 minutes before. The brief says it was written automatically. It never claims a cause.
We also write a brief when Polymarket and Kalshi (or another deep real-money venue) are 8 or more points apart on the same question, with at least $50,000 traded on each. One per question a day. It says what each venue had and that the rules may differ.
Other venues
Next to Polymarket we show what Kalshi, Smarkets, Limitless, Myriad, Metaculus and Manifold say about the same question, when they have one. Pairs on our standing pages are checked by hand; elsewhere we pair by title and outcome names and skip anything that doesn't line up cleanly. The average counts only real-money venues with enough traded, and we flag any gap of 8 points or more. Myriad mixes points and USDC, Metaculus is a forecast rather than a market, and Manifold is play money, so they're shown but not averaged. Every venue, side by side.
The numbers behind the odds
Where a market bets on an official figure, we show the latest one beside it: the Fed's target range, CPI inflation, unemployment, the Sahm rule, GDP growth and the 10-year yield from the Federal Reserve, BLS, BEA and Treasury via FRED; WTI oil from the EIA via FRED; coin prices from CoinGecko. These are facts, not forecasts, and each links to its source.
Official and health sources
Alongside news outlets we read the Federal Reserve's press releases and speeches, the White House, UN News and the International Crisis Group, and for health the WHO, CDC travel notices and the ECDC.
Weather and hazards
The weather page maps live alerts from GDACS (the UN and European Commission's disaster alert system, used under CC BY 4.0), earthquakes of magnitude 5.5 and up from USGS, Atlantic and eastern Pacific storms from the National Hurricane Center, and named storms and volcanoes worldwide from NASA's EONET. Alert colours are GDACS's own impact ratings. Temperature markets come from Kalshi and Polymarket and settle on official weather-station readings.
What we don't do
We don't take bets, we don't link to betting with an affiliate code, and nothing here is betting or investment advice. We aren't affiliated with Polymarket or any other venue we show.