Methodology
How we read prediction-market contracts.
Every prediction market presents three different objects. Most readers conflate them. We name all three in every Memo, and read each separately.
Three objects, not one.
Every prediction market presents three different objects that participants tend to confuse. The real-world event — what happened, in ordinary language. The market narrative — what traders, news, and social posts believe the market is about. The contract reality — what the rules, source, deadline, and dispute process actually pay on.
Most discussion of a prediction market lives in the first two. Settlement turns on the third. A Memo names all three and reads each separately — never collapsing the contract into the narrative or the narrative into the event.
What a Memo reads for.
Ambiguity
Where ordinary-language meaning diverges from contract meaning. We read the verbs, exclusions, thresholds, and tense carefully. Reference case: the Cardi B halftime market, where “perform” had no shared definition across venues and the same facts mapped to two settlements.
Source
The named source that actually decides settlement, and the chain of reports that surround it. We assess source specificity, publication schedule, and revision risk. Reference case: 2022 Polymarket territory markets, where conflicting battlefield reports from major news sources forced literal rule reading on contested ground.
Timing
The determination window vs the event time. The event can happen before the deadline and still fail if confirmation arrives after. The deadline-truth is not the same as the eventual truth.
Dispute
What settlement actually requires from platform discretion, challenge process, or fallback rules. Reference case: the Khamenei carveout class action, where a discretionary death-carveout clause moved a market from clean payout into active litigation.
What we don’t do.
- We do not recommend trades.
- We do not custody funds.
- We do not operate markets.
- We do not predict probabilities.
- We do not advise on positions.
We publish reading, not signals. Every Memo names the contract, the source, the deadline, and the dispute path. What the reader does with that reading is the reader’s decision.
Reasoning compounds. Signals decay.
A buy/sell call is right or wrong, then expires. A reading of the contract teaches the reader to see future contracts. The next market the reader encounters will have its own ambiguity, its own source, its own timing edge.
We bet on the second kind of value. Pays If publishes the reading the desk would have done before the market resolved. Subscribers learn how to read; they don’t take dictation.
We do not advise. We read the contract.
How scores are derived.
Every Memo carries a single Resolution Risk Score from 0 to 100, built from four sub-scores: Ambiguity (0–30), Source (0–20), Timing (0–15), and Dispute (0–35). Each sub-score is the desk’s documented reading of that dimension against the contract, the source record, the determination window, and the dispute path. The total is the sum.
The scores shown on the home index are pre-launch reference values, derived from the public record of each case. Subscribers receive the full sub-score reasoning, source citations, and analyst note with every Memo.