Overview
Educational articles on prediction markets, forecasting, and text analytics.
These guides cover the concepts behind prediction markets, forecasting methods, and the analytical techniques that turn public conversation into structured data. Each article is written to give you a thorough understanding of the subject rather than a surface-level overview.
Fundamentals
These guides cover the basics: what a prediction market is, the contract underneath it, where these markets trade, and how the whole idea came about.
Core Concepts
What a prediction market is, how it works, and how it compares with sports betting and investing.
Event Contracts
What an event contract is, how it differs from options and futures, and why its price reads as a probability.
Venue Types
Where event contracts trade and how each venue model handles custody, settlement, and resolution.
History of Prediction Markets
How prediction markets evolved from Gilded Age Wall Street to regulated exchanges, and the patterns that repeat.
Market Mechanics
These guides explain how a price becomes a probability, where that price comes from, how to read it, and how a market settles once the outcome is known.
Prices and Probabilities
How prediction market prices convert to probabilities, and why the two are not quite the same.
Order Books
Where prediction market prices come from when there is no bookmaker to set them.
Reading a Market
How to read a live prediction market's prices, spread, and depth before taking a position.
Market Resolution
How a prediction market decides a real-world outcome, and what happens when the result is disputed.
Accuracy & Trust
These guides answer how much the price can be trusted: how accuracy is measured, how markets compare with polls and sportsbooks, and whether prices can be manipulated.
Market Accuracy
Why a prediction market's accuracy is measured across many prices and outcomes, not any single one.
Markets vs. Polls
How opinion polls and prediction markets differ, which tends to be more accurate, and when to trust each.
Markets vs. Sportsbooks
How prediction markets differ from sportsbooks, from who sets the price to how winning accounts are treated.
Market Manipulation
Why manipulated prediction market prices tend to revert, and why resolution is the more exposed layer.
Forecasting Craft
A market price is one way to forecast the future. Human judgment is another, and both rely on the same underlying skills. These guides explain those skills: why crowds can forecast well, what sets the best individual forecasters apart, and how forecasting accuracy is measured and improved.
Wisdom of Crowds
Why collective estimates are often accurate, the conditions that accuracy depends on, and when crowds fail.
Superforecasting
What the Good Judgment Project found about accurate forecasters, and how far the craft carries into markets.
Calibration
What it means for probability forecasts to match outcome frequencies, and how the skill is measured and trained.
Brier Score
What the standard accuracy score for probability forecasts measures, and what counts as a good one.
Base Rates
Why probability estimates start from the frequency of comparable past cases, and when that anchor fails.
Alternative Data
Underneath a market price is the public conversation that surrounds the event, and these guides explain how to measure it. Sentiment analysis reads the overall tone of that conversation, and emotion classification breaks that tone into specific feelings such as anger, fear, and joy. Read alongside a price or a poll, this alternative data for prediction markets can flag a shift in mood before it shows up in either.