Frequently Asked Questions
Polymarket is the world's largest prediction market — a platform where people buy and sell shares in the outcomes of real-world events. Topics span politics, sports, crypto, finance, geopolitics, culture, and more. Share prices range from $0.01 to $0.99 and represent the crowd's real-time estimate of how likely an event is to happen. If you buy a share at $0.30 and the outcome occurs, that share pays out $1.00, giving you a $0.70 profit. Unlike traditional sportsbooks, Polymarket does not act as the house — it never takes the opposing side of your trade or profits from your losses. Instead, it operates as a peer-to-peer prediction market where every trade is matched against another participant. You can buy or sell shares at any time before a market resolves, making it easy to lock in profits or cut losses as new information develops.
A prediction market is a type of exchange where participants trade on the outcome of future events rather than stocks or commodities. Prices in a prediction market function as probabilities: a share trading at $0.75 implies the crowd sees roughly a 75% chance that outcome will happen. Because traders put real money behind their views, they are financially motivated to be accurate, which harnesses what researchers call the "wisdom of crowds." Academic work — including studies from the Iowa Electronic Markets and the research cited in James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds — has repeatedly shown that prediction markets tend to produce more accurate forecasts than polls, pundits, or individual experts alone. On Polymarket, this principle is applied across thousands of markets covering elections, crypto prices, geopolitical developments, sports championships, and much more.
Polymarket hosts thousands of active prediction markets across a wide range of categories. On this page you can view real-time odds and trade on popular predictions like "What will S&P 500 (SPY) hit Week of May 4 2026?," "S&P 500 (SPX) Opens Up or Down on May 8?," and "S&P 500 (SPX) Up or Down on May 8?" — along with markets on Fed interest-rate decisions, crude oil futures, Eurovision, NBA champions, Formula 1, and breaking geopolitical events. You can browse predictions by category — including Sports, Politics, Crypto, Awards, Economy, and more — or use the search and filter tools to find the exact market you're looking for. New markets are added regularly as newsworthy events emerge.
Odds on Polymarket are expressed as prices between $0.01 and $0.99, and each price directly represents an implied probability. For example, if "Yes" shares on a market are trading at $0.65, traders collectively estimate a 65% chance that the event will happen. Prices update continuously as traders react to new information — news reports, data releases, policy changes — making Polymarket odds a live, crowd-sourced signal of how likely an event is at any given moment.
Polymarket publishes its track record on a dedicated Accuracy page. As of the latest data, Polymarket odds are accurate over 90% of the time a full month before a market resolves, and that figure rises above 96% within four hours of resolution. The platform also reports a Brier score — a standard statistical measure where lower numbers mean better calibration — of 0.0843 across resolved markets. In practical terms, this means that when Polymarket prices indicate a 70% probability, the corresponding outcome happens roughly 70% of the time. Research consistently shows that prediction markets with real financial stakes tend to outperform polls, expert panels, and pundit forecasts because traders are rewarded for accuracy and penalized for being wrong.