What the market priced vs what happened

What a 59% price means

A prediction market sells a contract that pays $1 if something happens and $0 if it doesn't. When that contract trades at 59 cents, the market is saying: at this price, buyers and sellers are both content. Convert it and you get an implied probability of 59%— read as “if this exact situation played out many times, this outcome happens roughly 59 of every 100.” The other side is priced at roughly 41%.

The most common misreading is treating 59% as a prediction. It isn't. A 59% favourite is expected to lose about two times in five, and when it does, the market was not “wrong” — its own stated 41% simply arrived. This is exactly why one event can never settle the question.

Why two venues agreeing is informative

Polymarket and Kalshi are separate venues with separate users, separate liquidity and separate rules. When they price the same question within a point or two of each other, that agreement is weak but real evidence the number reflects shared information rather than one venue's crowd or one venue's thin order book. When they diverge, the gap is the story: it usually means low liquidity, subtly different contract wording — a market on the trophy is not the same market as a 90-minute result — or genuine disagreement. That is why this ledger records the spread instead of averaging it into a single tidy number.

Why one event proves nothing and a ledger proves something

Take any single resolved event and you can tell whichever story you like: the market “called it” or the market “got it wrong.” Neither claim survives contact with statistics, because a single observation has no error bar. The only meaningful test is calibration — collect every occasion the market said roughly 60%, and check whether those things happened roughly 60% of the time. Do that across hundreds of events and you have an answer. Do it across one and you have an anecdote.

That is the entire design of this page. Each entry is recorded before resolution, with sources, so it can be audited later; the ledger accumulates; and the calibration question only gets asked once there are enough resolved entries to ask it honestly. If you want the underlying mechanics — how prices move, what moves them, and what the number is not — the full guide is how prediction markets work.

Why the prices are recorded in advance

A price nobody wrote down cannot be recovered. Once an event resolves, the market that priced it is gone — the order book closes, the page changes, and every later account of “what the market thought” is reconstruction. Writing the venue, the number, the source URL and the timestamp down beforehand is the only version of this that can be checked by someone who doesn't take our word for it.