How prediction markets work, how a call is scored, and what a public record proves.
The 2026 US midterm elections are on Tuesday 3 November 2026. As of 4 September 2026, Polymarket priced the Democratic Party at 89.5 cents to control the House and 51.5 cents to control the Senate, on $10.1 million and $4.1 million of traded volume. The poll averages point the same way on the House. The Senate is the question nobody has settled.
9 min read
Prediction markets are accurate where they are deep and short dated, and unreliable where they are not. On a cross platform sample of resolved markets measured to 14 October 2025, Polymarket scored a Brier loss of 0.1652 and Kalshi 0.1982, against 0.25 for always guessing 50 percent. On the 2024 US election specifically, one study found that only 67 percent of Polymarket markets priced the eventual winner above 50 percent.
6 min read
Beating a prediction market means being right where the price was wrong, often enough and on enough events that luck stops being the explanation. There is no trick that works everywhere. What works is a method: start from the price rather than your opinion, disagree only in the few situations where prices are known to be soft, put a specific number on it, and score every call against the price at the moment you made it.
10 min read
Brazil votes on Sunday 4 October 2026, with a runoff on 25 October if no presidential candidate passes half the valid votes. As of 4 September 2026, Polymarket priced Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva at 55.5 cents to win the presidency and Flávio Bolsonaro at 41 cents, on 142.9 million dollars of traded volume. The polls have the runoff closer than that.
8 min read
A Brier score measures how far your probabilities were from reality. For each forecast, take the probability you gave, subtract the outcome written as 1 for happened and 0 for did not, and square the result. Average that over all your forecasts. Zero is perfect, 0.25 is what you get by saying 50 percent every time, and 1 is as wrong as it is possible to be.
8 min read
Calibration is the match between what you claim and what happens. If you are calibrated, the events you call 70 percent happen about 70 percent of the time, the ones you call 90 percent happen about 90 percent of the time, and so on down the scale. It is a property of a batch of forecasts, never of one. A single 70 percent call that comes true proves nothing.
7 min read
A track record assembled from social media posts measures what survived, not what was said. Posts can be deleted, edited or quietly reframed, and nothing marks the gap afterwards. Pew Research Center found 18% of tweets vanish from public view within three months. Since losing calls are the ones most likely to disappear, the visible set always flatters the author.
8 min read
Between September 2026 and December 2027 there are four national elections, twenty central bank meetings, one Nobel week, two Oscar ceremonies worth of nominations, and two world championships with fixed dates already published. This page lists them with the source for each date, so you can pick something to call and know when the answer arrives.
7 min read
Judge a forecaster on four numbers and ignore everything else. How often they beat the market price at the moment they spoke. By how much. How early, meaning whether the price later moved toward them. And over how many resolved events. The fourth number decides whether the first three mean anything, and almost every public ranking leaves it out.
7 min read
This is a complete forecasting bot in about 100 lines of Python. It reads open events from the insiderz API, asks a language model for a probability on each one, and posts a call when the model disagrees with the market price by enough to be worth saying. The call is locked with the timestamp and the market price. No wallet balance, no gas, no exchange account.
6 min read
Six platforms let you forecast real events with nothing at stake: Metaculus, Manifold, Good Judgment Open, Fatebook, Almanis and insiderz. All six give you a dated, scored record. They differ on one thing that matters most, what your forecast is scored against. Only one of them scores you against the live market price. The table below has the columns, checked on 4 September 2026.
9 min read
A prediction market resolves when someone proposes the outcome and nobody successfully disputes it. On Polymarket the proposal goes through the UMA optimistic oracle: the proposer posts a 750 dollar bond in USDC.e, a two hour challenge period opens, and if nobody challenges, winning shares pay 1 dollar each. If someone challenges, the question escalates to token holder voting, which is slower and occasionally lands somewhere the plain reading of the question would not.
6 min read
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