About Predictions¶
Understand what the Predictions product is, how the money works, and what your firm needs before you can offer it.
Predictions is an add-on product that lets your traders take a side on a real-world question — "will this happen by this date?" — inside the same WebTrader they already use. Each question is a prediction market, and each side of it is sold as a prediction contract.
Predictions is off for every firm and every brand until it is deliberately turned on. See Turn on Predictions.
How a prediction market works¶
A prediction market asks one question with two outcomes, Yes and No. Every contract pays exactly USD 1 if its outcome turns out to be the right one, and nothing if it does not. The price a trader pays is therefore always somewhere between nothing and a dollar, and it reads naturally as a percentage chance: a contract priced at 35 cents is the market saying "about a 35 % chance".
Three properties shape the whole product, and they are worth stating plainly because they differ from trading an instrument:
- Buy only. A trader buys contracts on a side. There is no selling short, no leverage, and no margin.
- Held to the result. A contract is not closed early. It is held until the question is settled, at which point it is worth USD 1 or nothing.
- Your firm is the counterparty. Your firm prices the contract, sells it, and pays the winners. Nothing a trader does is passed on to an outside venue.
Where the questions come from¶
Your firm does not write the questions. A market source supplies the catalog of questions, their rules, their timings, and the final result. Your team reviews what arrives and decides which of those markets to sell — see Review and publish a market.
The source is a reference for facts only. It never sees your traders, your orders, or your money, and no order is ever routed to it. Traders see the name of the source on each market page, so the origin of a question and of its result is never a mystery.
Every market names who decides the answer
A market is only publishable when the source names an external, public authority for its result. Your firm sets the price and pays out, so it must never be the body that decides the outcome — publishing a market with no named result source is refused, with a message saying exactly that. See Review and publish a market.
The provider's words are never rewritten
A market's question, rules, and resolution source are shown to your traders exactly as the source states them. Your team can add its own headline and context around a market, but it can never replace or contradict those facts.
The money model¶
Predictions money is kept apart from trading money.
- A separate prediction account. A trader who uses Predictions gets a dedicated prediction account, always denominated in USD, with its own wallet. Contracts are bought and settled there, and nowhere else.
- Funded by internal transfer. Money enters that wallet by transferring it from the trader's existing funds — never by a separate deposit, and never as a credit your team can hand out from the Predictions screens.
- Your firm's price. The price a trader pays is the source price plus the markup your pricing policy adds. Your markup is your revenue on the price.
- Commission on top. A separate, clearly disclosed fee, set by your commission policy, is charged alongside the price rather than folded into it.
- Capped and known in advance. Because contracts are buy-only with a fixed USD 1 payout, a trader's worst case is what they paid, and your firm's worst case per market is bounded by the contracts it sold. The risk policy is where you set the ceilings that keep it so.
What your team can do today¶
| Area | Where |
|---|---|
| Turn the product on for a brand | Turn on Predictions |
| See the state of the catalog at a glance | The Predictions overview |
| Decide which markets to sell | Review and publish a market |
| Pause, resume, retire, and re-review what you sell | Manage your listings |
| Read a market's rules and write the copy traders see | Market details and featured copy |
| Choose which categories each country is shown | Choose which categories each country sees |
| Set your markup | Pricing policies |
| Set your fee | Commission policies |
| Set your exposure ceilings | The risk policy |
| Put capital behind the product | The Predictions reserve |
| See how much of those ceilings you are using | Your exposure |
| Look up what customers bought, and what was refused | Orders and positions |
| See what results paid out | Settlements |
| Check that market data is arriving | Provider health |
| Read back every change | The Predictions audit trail |
| Hold and release new selling | Holds and blocked selling |
| Work through anomalies the platform raised | Reconciliation exceptions |
| Know what traders see | What your traders see and The trader's prediction wallet |
Watch it end to end¶
Four short walkthroughs cover the product from both sides:
- Set Predictions up as a broker
- Monitor the book as a broker
- Fund a prediction wallet as a trader
- Buy a prediction as a trader
What is not in this release¶
The product is complete end to end — a broker can list, price, and limit markets, and a trader can fund a wallet, buy, and be paid out. A few things are deliberately not here yet:
- Selling a contract back. Contracts are bought only and run to settlement.
- Market statistics. Volume and price-movement figures are not being recorded yet, so traders are told they are unavailable rather than shown a number nobody measured.
- A settlement detail screen. Settlements are listed and filtered on their own screen, but a single settlement has no page of its own yet.
- Clearing a block you did not place. Your team can hold and release new selling, and can acknowledge an exception. Clearing a block the platform raised itself is done with your platform provider — see Holds and blocked selling.