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Plain-English how-tos and definitions for reading a prediction market.
- What Is a Prediction Market?A prediction market is a market in contracts that pay a fixed amount if a defined event happens. The price is what people will pay for that payoff right now — useful as a probability estimate, but not a fact about the world.
- Bid, Ask, Spread, Depth, and the Price You Can Actually TradeLast trade, midpoint, bid, and ask are different numbers, and the one a venue displays is a formatting choice. The price you can actually get also depends on how much depth exists for the size you need.
- How YES and NO Contracts ResolveYES and NO settle from written contract terms: the condition, deadline, time zone, resolution source, and the rules for messy edge cases.
- Why Complementary Prices Should Add Up to About a DollarYes and No are two sides of one dollar of collateral. A sum under $1 or over $1 is a fact about complementary prices — before fees, spread, and fill risk — not a verdict that the event is wrong.
- Why the Number on the Screen Is Not Always the Number You Can TradeThe displayed price is often a midpoint. Buyers pay the ask. Taker fees apply on many categories. A Yes+No sum that looks like $1 can still not be a lock.
- Markets Are Not PollsA prediction-market price is a tradeable claim with a named payoff. A poll percentage is a different forecasting object. The same numeral does not make them the same measurement.
- What a Negative-Risk Multi-Outcome Event IsA simple market is two tokens. A negative-risk event links several of those markets so that one No can convert into a Yes on every other outcome. That is a conversion machine — not a promise that you cannot lose, and not a live book that sums to a dollar.
- How to Read an Event Page Versus a Market PageOfficial docs treat an event as a container and a market as the Yes/No book. The documented path — /event/ versus /market/ — is how you tell which object you opened. A matching headline is not identity.
- How to compare two contracts on the same questionTwo venues can quote the same headline and still be selling different contracts. Check the wording, the source, and the deadline before you compare the numbers.
- What the Documented Venue Means by a Market OrderOn the documented venue, every user-facing order is a limit order. A "market order" is that same order priced to cross the book. The estimate is a snapshot. Delayed is not a fill.
- How Split, Merge, and Redeem WorkSplit turns a dollar of pUSD into a Yes and a No. Merge turns that complete pair back into a dollar. Redeem pays the winning token after resolution. All three sit outside the order book — not a how-to, and not a live book that sums to a dollar.