A prediction market is a marketplace where people trade contracts tied to the outcome of a real-world event — an election, an interest-rate decision, a sports result, a weather milestone. Each contract pays out if the event happens and expires worthless if it doesn’t, so its price reflects how likely traders collectively think the outcome is.
Because a “Yes” contract typically settles at $1 if the event happens and $0 if it doesn’t, its current price can be read roughly as a probability. A Yes price around $0.62 implies the market is pricing about a 62% chance. This is the single most useful thing to understand: on a prediction market, price ≈ probability.
Prices move because traders buy and sell. If new information makes an outcome look more likely, buyers bid the Yes price up; if it looks less likely, sellers push it down. The price is simply where buyers and sellers currently agree to trade — a live, money-backed consensus rather than a single expert’s opinion.
Prediction market prices can move fast when news breaks, when a big trade hits the order book, or when a market is thinly traded. A quiet market can jump on a single headline. That responsiveness is a feature — it’s why markets often reflect new information before traditional commentary does — but it also means a price is a snapshot, not a settled fact.
Prediction markets have a strong track record as forecasting tools because participants have money on the line. But they are not oracles: they can be wrong, biased by low liquidity, or distorted by a small number of traders. Treat a market price as one informative signal among many, not a certainty.
DePredict aggregates live prices from Polymarket and Kalshi and normalizes them so you can scan many markets at once. It is informational only — not a trading venue, broker, or financial adviser. For the mechanics of each platform, see What Is Polymarket? and What Is Kalshi?, and for reading the numbers, see How to Read Prediction Market Odds.