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Holds and blocked selling

Stop your firm selling new prediction contracts, release the hold when you are ready, and understand any block you did not place yourself.

Predictions has one brake, and it is a brake on selling more — never on paying out. Your own team can pull it and release it from the Backoffice; the platform can also apply one on its own when the books do not add up.

While anything is blocking, a banner sits above the content on every Predictions screen.

Prerequisites

  • Your permission group grants the Predictions View capability to see the banner, and the Operations capability to hold or release.
  • Predictions actions are refused while you are acting as another user. Sign back in as yourself first — the buttons explain themselves when they are unavailable.

Hold new selling

  1. In the left sidebar, open Predictions and choose Provider health.
  2. Click Hold new buys at the top of the page.
  3. Enter a Reason. It is stored with the hold and is what the next person to look at it reads, so write it for them. Up to 1,000 characters.
  4. (Optional) Set Review by — when you want to be reminded to re-decide. Leave it empty for 24 hours from now. Very near and very distant times are adjusted into a sensible window, so read the confirmation for the time that actually took effect.
  5. Click Hold new buys.

New buying stops immediately for every market your firm lists. The page confirms the hold is in force and repeats the review time.

The review time never reopens anything

Reaching Review by does not lift the hold. It only marks the block Review due in the banner, as a nudge to look at it again. Selling resumes when a person releases the hold, and never on its own.

Release the hold

  1. Open Provider health again.
  2. Click Release hold, give a Reason, and confirm.

The confirmation is worth reading. It says one of two things:

  • The hold is released and new buys are open again.
  • Your hold is released, but the firm is still blocked by something else. Releasing your own hold lifts only your own hold; anything else standing is listed in the banner above.

What the banner tells you

The banner shows every block in force, not just one. The first is the broadest, and anything else appears beneath it under Also blocking, with a line reminding you that clearing the one above will not reopen the firm on its own.

For each block you get four facts:

  • Set by — where it came from: a brake on the whole environment, the platform, or your own firm.
  • Scope — how wide it reaches: your firm, one market source, one category, one event, or one market.
  • Reason — the reason recorded when it was applied.
  • Note — any text left with it.

A block past its review date carries a Review due badge and keeps blocking.

An environment-wide brake is drawn as its own separate banner, because nobody can clear it from the Backoffice. Your platform provider lifts it.

Exactly what a block stops

It stops:

  • New buying — both the price a trader is quoted and the purchase itself.
  • Publishing a market, and resuming a paused listing.

It never stops:

  • Settlement. Results are still applied and winners are still paid.
  • Wallet withdrawals. A trader can always move money back out to a trading account, so nobody's money is trapped.
  • Contracts already held. They are untouched and settle as they are.
  • Pausing and retiring listings. A block never stops you from selling less.

That split is deliberate. Because contracts are buy-only and run to settlement, your firm's exposure can only grow through new buying and only shrink through settlement. Stopping new buys is therefore exactly "stop my exposure growing", while stopping settlement would only withhold money the books already say is owed.

Blocks you did not place

Your hold is not the only thing that can block selling. The platform's own reconciliation raises a block when it finds evidence that a scope's numbers do not add up, and records an exception describing what it found.

Two rules follow from that, and they are the ones that catch people out:

  • Releasing your hold never lifts an automatic block. They are separate records. The banner keeps showing whatever is left.
  • An automatic block cannot be cleared while its exception is still open. Acknowledge the exception first — see Reconciliation exceptions. There is no override, because clearing a block whose anomaly is still live is not resuming service, it is resuming selling on a scope the books already contradict.

Acknowledging is what makes the block clearable; clearing a block at a scope you did not place a hold on is not done from the Backoffice in this release. Once the exception is acknowledged, ask your platform provider to clear it.

Note

A settlement hold is a different thing entirely, and is not something a broker can apply to its own payouts. If a result is disputed, positions move to Correction review and are worked from there — see Settlements.