What can you trade on a prediction market?
Most people meet prediction markets through one headline, usually an election, and file them away as a betting site for politics. The real board is far stranger and far wider: interest rates, a Grand Slam final, the temperature in New York, how many times someone will post this week, whether a rocket leaves the pad. If it has an outcome and a date, somebody will price it.
A prediction market prices any question with a clear answer and a deadline. In practice that spans politics, geopolitics, economics, crypto, business, every major sport, the weather, culture, the internet itself and science. Each family behaves differently, rewards different reading, and carries its own trap. You can watch the whole board live on our market map.
01The rule that makes anything tradable
A market needs three things: a question nobody can wriggle out of, a deadline, and a source that settles it. That is the entire specification, which is why the subject matter can be almost anything. A share costs somewhere between one and ninety-nine cents, pays one dollar if it resolves your way and nothing if it does not, so the price reads directly as the crowd’s probability. Everything below is the same mechanism pointed at a different corner of the world.
02Elections and politics
The family that made prediction markets famous, and still the deepest. Presidential and parliamentary races, primaries, individual seats, cabinet appointments, confirmation votes, leadership challenges, whether a government shuts down before a date. These markets are liquid, heavily watched, and move on polls, filings and debate nights. They reward whoever reads the resolution wording most carefully, because "who wins" and "who is declared winner by a given date" are not the same market.
03Geopolitics and world events
Ceasefires, treaties, sanctions, alliance membership, summit outcomes, whether a border reopens. Slower moving than elections and often thinner, which cuts both ways: fewer eyes means more mispricing, and also more slippage when you size up. The reading here is documentary rather than statistical, since the news that matters is usually public hours before the price adjusts.
04Economics and rates
Central bank decisions, inflation prints, growth and unemployment figures, recession calls, tariff changes. This family has the tightest link to professional finance, so the crowd is sharp and the prices are usually fair. The edge, when it exists, tends to sit in the gap between a scheduled release and the market’s slow repricing, or in the exact threshold a market uses: above three percent and above three point zero percent are different bets.
05Crypto
Price thresholds by a date, protocol upgrades, exchange listings, regulatory approvals, whether a token tops a ranking. Crypto markets run around the clock and reprice violently, which suits anyone who is already watching charts. Note the natural pairing: the same view can be expressed here as a dated question, or on a perpetual future as a directional position with no expiry. Two rooms, one opinion.
06Stocks and business
Earnings beats, guidance, product launches, acquisitions, leadership changes, whether a private company files to go public. This is where the boundary between prediction markets and traditional finance blurs, and where the question "will SpaceX announce an IPO this year" trades next to the same names people follow in their brokerage app. Opusfund is live on Polymarket today, and more venues are on the way, which is how this family keeps widening.
07Soccer
Match results, tournament winners, top scorer, qualification, goals thresholds. The most modelled sport on earth, which means the crowd is strong on the big fixtures and much weaker on the twelfth match of a congested week. Team news is the classic source: a line-up published an hour before kickoff is public information that the price has not always digested.
08US sports
Championship winners, division races, MVP awards, season win totals, playoff qualification. Long horizons and deep liquidity make these markets a good place to hold a view for months rather than hours, and the futures-style questions reward the person who priced the schedule in September rather than the one reacting in January.
09Tennis, golf and individual sport
Grand Slam winners, tournament fields, head to head outcomes, whether a seed reaches a round. Individual sport concentrates risk in one body, so injury and fatigue news carries more weight per headline than it does in a team sport. Fields of a hundred golfers produce long odds and, occasionally, prices that have not been touched in days.
10Weather and climate
Temperature records, hurricane landfalls, rainfall, snow on a given day, whether a year finishes as the hottest on record. This is one of the purest families available: the resolution source is a public measurement, and forecasts are themselves probabilistic, so the comparison between a model’s number and a market’s price is unusually direct. It is also the family that most surprises newcomers, which is exactly why it is worth knowing about.
11Culture and awards
Best Picture, album of the year, the next actor cast in a franchise, box office thresholds, a chart position. Prices here move on trade press, screener chatter and precursor awards rather than on any statistic, and the crowd skews towards fans, which occasionally leaves sentiment sitting where analysis should be.
12The internet, priced
How many times a person will post in a week, whether a video passes a view count, follower milestones, whether a company ships a feature. These markets sound trivial and are frequently the sharpest reading exercise on the board, because the resolution is a public counter anyone can check and the difficulty is entirely in the base rate. Counting how many posts someone averaged over the last ten weeks is not glamorous, and it is usually the whole edge.
13Science, space and technology
Launch windows, mission milestones, model releases, approvals, prizes. Timelines slip in this family more reliably than anywhere else, which is itself a base rate worth knowing before taking either side of a date question.
14Why the range is the point
A trader who only knows soccer has one market and a hundred competitors who also only know soccer. A fund reading twelve families at once can sit out the crowded ones and wait for the corner where the price has not caught up, which is what edge actually means. The methods for finding it are in the strategies guide. Breadth also spreads risk across outcomes that have nothing to do with each other: a hurricane, a rate decision and a semi final do not resolve together.
Breadth is not licence. A thin market can be mispriced and still be a bad bet, because getting out costs more than the edge was worth. Size for the market you are in, not the one you wish it was.
15How your CEO uses the whole board
This is the practical difference between reading a list and running a fund. Your CEO sweeps every family on the rhythm you set, prices what it finds with tools it writes itself, and only proposes what clears your conviction floor. You can point it anywhere in plain words: stay off politics, go deep on tennis, watch the weather desk in summer. The board is enormous, and you never have to read it yourself.
What to remember
- Any question with a clear answer, a deadline and a source can become a market.
- The board spans twelve families, from elections and rates to weather, culture and post counts.
- Each family rewards a different kind of reading, and hides a different trap.
- Breadth is the advantage: it lets you skip the crowded markets and spread unrelated risk.
- See the live board on the market map.