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Sports.co

Intermediate

How prediction markets work

Order books, contract settlement, and why exchange quotes can be read more directly as probabilities.

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Illustration — no market data

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How this lesson runs

  1. 01

    Contracts, not lines

  2. 02

    Order books and liquidity

  3. 03

    Settlement sources

Want this applied to a specific price? The Sports.co Analyst walks through the arithmetic. It explains method only — never picks.

Video walkthrough: How prediction markets work

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Contracts, not lines

An event contract settles at a fixed value if a defined condition occurs. Its trading price between 0 and 1 corresponds to the market's probability estimate for that condition.

Order books and liquidity

Prices come from resting orders of other participants. Thin books produce wide spreads, which limits how precisely a quote can be read as a probability.

Settlement sources

A well-designed contract names an explicit public settlement source. Ambiguous settlement language is a structural risk that sits alongside price risk.

Sources

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Method explained in our own words. This lesson asserts no market price, result, or statistic.