The anonymous energy trader @CRUDEOIL231 on X manages a pod at a hedge fund owned by one of the world’s largest commodity trading firms.

He took a break from longing his oil longs to survey the damage to production capacity, and explain why leaving Iran in control of Hormuz is fundamentally untenable.

This interview has been edited for length. All answers are his own.

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What do you make of the ceasefire deal announced yesterday? What will this do to oil prices in April / May / June?

Oil prices will likely show weakness for a few trading days. However, it is highly doubtful that this will lead to a permanent peace agreement.

Conditions such as Iran’s continued control over the Strait of Hormuz, acceptance of uranium enrichment, lifting of all major sanctions, payment of reparations to Iran, and a cessation of hostilities on all fronts including Hezbollah in Lebanon seem nearly impossible to reach a consensus on.

Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz directly conflicts with the vital interests of GCC countries, and the uranium enrichment issue remains difficult to resolve given the justifications for this war.

Lifting sanctions requires not just executive action but congressional approval. Furthermore, with both sides claiming victory, paying reparations would essentially mean admitting defeat and acknowledging acts of aggression. For the US government, this is an absolute non-starter.

The two-week ceasefire appears to be more of a tactical timeout rather than a fundamental resolution. While it may cap the ceiling for front-month prices, that’s about it. Oil prices will continue to stay at elevated levels.

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Do you think Hormuz traffic will normalize? What time frame?

Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi stated that safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz will be possible over the next two weeks, provided that “cooperation with the Iranian military and technical constraints are fully taken into account.” We need to consider exactly what this implies.

My thought is that this could mean bypassing the standard shipping lanes in favor of alternative routes toward Iran and Oman. Regardless, the flow will not return to normal.

The 150 million barrels of floating storage currently trapped in the Persian Gulf will likely attempt to exit the Strait. The short-term dip in oil prices reflects the market’s fear that this crude will hit the market all at once.

The real issue is the two-week timeframe. Since no one knows what happens after those 14 days, most shipowners might be willing to exit the Gulf from west to east to offload, but they will hesitate to enter the Gulf for loading.

Even in an optimistic scenario, I don’t see the traffic volume over the next two weeks recovering to more than 50% of pre-war levels.

What level of impairment has there been to Iran / GCC production capacity? If the ceasefire holds will production be able to snap back fairly quickly?

Nearly 12 mb/d of production has already been shut in, and it cannot be restored quickly.

First the tankers currently inside must exit the Strait. Then incoming tankers must enter from outside for loading. Finally to actually restart production, the onshore storage tanks, currently at full capacity, must be drained before the taps can be turned back on.

Therefore two weeks is nowhere near enough time to resume production. Even assuming the ceasefire holds, it would take at least 6-8 weeks to recover more than 70% of the shut-in volume. In the meantime, global crude inventories will continue to be drained.

You have written that any kind of deal that enshrines Iran as the tollbooth of Hormuz is untenable for Gulf states. Can you unpack this? Is it worse for some than others?

If Iran introduces a toll system, the GCC countries—especially Saudi—will never accept it. The flow through Hormuz is several times larger than the total spare capacity of OPEC+.

If Iran gains the ability to impose tolls, they will become the most powerful and unrivaled swing producer in history, controlling a global oil flow of approximately 20 mb/d.

This is an unacceptable situation for Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The issue isn’t the amount of the toll; it’s the fact that Iran would hold a say over the future flow of GCC countries.

They would gain the authority to arbitrarily regulate a 20 mb/d flow. Saudi’s influence doesn’t just come from being wealthy; it stems from their status as the world’s only true swing producer.

I don’t believe they can simply stand by and watch their regional hegemony handed over to Iran, along with all their leverage and influence.

For them, Iranian control of the Strait is a more existential threat than any missile or drone.

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What do you make of the Iran hit on the Saudi petrochemical plants? What sources are you looking at here?

I believe this was a clear example of a proportional response. The goal was to demonstrate that if they strike our infrastructure, we can hit theirs back just as hard.

It wasn’t an attack aimed at mutual destruction. If Iran truly wanted to go for the nuclear option, the simplest and most effective way would be to target or contaminate the seawater intake systems of desalination plants across the GCC.

Striking petrochemical facilities was merely an act of retaliation. I monitored the flares via the NASA FIRMS system and directly confirmed the specific damage and its extent with a SABIC official.

How long would it take to develop viable pathways around Hormuz for the different GCC states?

Existing bypass routes like the East-West Pipeline and the Fujairah Pipeline are likely all there is. Saudi can reroute about 5 mb/d, and the UAE can divert around 1.5 to 2 mb/d of liquids.

Building new pipelines takes far too much time, and there is no guarantee that Iran—having already played the Hormuz card—would just sit back and watch such new bypasses being constructed.

Some ppl suggest using trucks, but that’s ridiculous. Just think about how many trucks it would take to move even a single million barrels. It’s simple math.

How do you think the ceasefire holds up or unwinds? What are the triggers or behaviors you’d be looking at for early signals?

As I mentioned above, the gap between the two sides revealed in this ceasefire announcement is much wider than it was before the war. Ultimately, a resumption of the conflict seems more likely.

We need to keep a close eye on the flow of US military assets into the Middle East and how much the actual traffic through the Strait of Hormuz recovers.

Furthermore the clashes between Hezbollah and Israel continue today. Since this is also part of the broader battlefield, it must be monitored closely. If these skirmishes persist, the window for diplomacy will only continue to shrink.

If you are a Gulf Arab state and think the current deal with Iran is unworkable, what levers do you have? Are they likely to try to stir up new rounds of conflict?

They are likely to try and drag the US into the war. They’ll be lobbying hard in Washington, and honestly, it won’t even require much finesse.

All they have to do is say: “Since Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz, we can’t restore our production even if we wanted to. We’ll be maintaining partial production cuts for the time being.”

If even a mere 2 mb/d production cut persists, oil prices will stay elevated, which will eventually force the US to seek a military solution. The US will find its way back to the Middle East on its own.

How are you tactically positioned on oil here given your views?

I have been rolling over front-month longs since the Brent April contract. I’ve booked significant profits, enough to fully cover my bonus pool for the next three years.

However today’s ceasefire announcement did lead to some losses in the June contract.

A supply shock is guaranteed due to the production already lost and the continued supply deficits we’ll see during the recovery process. Therefore once the market sell-off stabilizes, I plan to build long positions in back-month contracts.

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Best accounts / sources to follow on the energy aspects of the conflict?

From a data perspective, sources like Kpler and Platts are essential. However I personally gained my most valuable insights through business trips prior to the outbreak, where I spoke directly with Saudi and Israeli officials.

In fact, I was in Tel Aviv when the war broke out, which gave me the conviction to bet big and realize significant gains.

I believe the opinions and intelligence from actors on the ground are what truly matter. That is exactly why I headed to the Middle East in late February.

Any new energy questions we should have on Polymarket?

It would be helpful to ask specific questions like: “Even after the ceasefire, will there be a physical attack on a tanker passing through the Strait of Hormuz within the month of April that disrupts traffic for more than 24 hours?”

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Disclaimer

Nothing in The Oracle is financial, investment, legal or any other type of professional advice. Anything provided in any newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not meant to be an endorsement of any type of activity or any particular market or product. Terms of Service on polymarket.com prohibit US persons and persons from certain other jurisdictions from using Polymarket to trade, although data and information is viewable globally.

By Andrew Asani

In early April, odds on Polymarket that the Houthis, an Iranian-backed Shi’a rebel group based in northwest Yemen, would force the closure of Bab al-Mandab before April 30 rose from 21% to 30%. The rise began hours after a statement from a prominent Iranian official that Tehran “views Bab al-Mandab as it does Hormuz.” Similarly, Polymarket shows 41% odds that the Houthis will resume attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea by the same date.

However, from the perspective of this author, the odds in both markets are highly inflated, and make the common mistake of overestimating Iranian leverage over the Houthis, which since at least 2023 have become as financially dependent on Saudi Arabia as they have their traditional patrons in Tehran.

Far from seeking to go on the offensive, my conversations with Houthi officials paint a picture of an organization that is desperately dependent on monthly payments from Saudi Arabia to keep their soldiers armed and fed.

Since the February 28, 2026 launch of US-Israeli airstrikes on Iran and subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Saudi Arabia has rerouted 7m bpd of its oil exports through the Red Sea port of Yanbu, transforming the waterway along with Bab al-Mandab into Riyadh’s most important economic lifeline. As a result, the Houthis have been hesitant to launch attacks in the Red Sea that would drive up maritime insurance costs and antagonize Riyadh.

In fact, Houthi sources I spoke with told me that the reason the group waited nearly a month to enter the war with Israel was that it was awaiting its most recent tranche of Saudi payments to come through.

The Houthis and Saudi Arabia are typically thought of as mortal enemies. But this has not been the case since roughly April, 2022. That month, a UN brokered ceasefire between the Houthis and Yemen’s Saudi-backed government ended large-scale fighting between both sides for the first time since 2015. Throughout 2023, the ceasefire was renewed on the condition that Riyadh provide the Houthis hundreds of millions of dollars annually to pay its civil servants and security forces.

The Houthis became more dependent on Saudi payments throughout 2025, as the Trump Administration revoked licenses for petroleum offloading at ports and increased sanctions on terminals, port managers and vessels making deliveries in Houthi controlled territory, significantly reducing the group’s revenue from customs duties and its access to fuel needed to produce ballistic missiles.

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To Text a Houthi

Most analysts portray the Houthis in Yemen as a puppet of Iran, a “card” that Tehran is waiting until the right time to play. While the Houthis have been heavily equipped militarily by the IRGC, the Twitter Yemen experts tend to be ignorant and uninterested in the local forces shaping their decisionmaking.

I first became acquainted with the Houthis in 2014 while working in the Yemeni capital of Sana’a as an editor at The Yemen Times, the country’s largest English language newspaper. For most of that year, the Houthis were one faction among many in Sana’a, whose spokesmen were eager and friendly sources happy to spin the news for our mostly western readership.

Following the Houthis’ partial takeover of Sana’a on September 21, 2014, the group’s tone shifted from a desire to assist to a gradually increasing demand for control over what we published. On January 19, 2015, I left Yemen after a renewed round of fighting between the Houthis and Yemeni government forces finally made living in Sana’a unbearable.

That morning, I woke up to the sound of distant gunfire, a not wholly uncommon occurrence. Fighting quickly shifted to my neighborhood in Sana’a’s southern Hadda district, the site of Yemen’s Presidential Palace. By 10am, a Houthi sniper placed himself on my neighbor’s roof, continually harassing government forces who fired back with machine guns and occasional tank fire.

When a ceasefire had been reached that afternoon, I wasted no time and booked a flight to Jordan. However, my contacts among the Houthis would later prove useful after beginning a career in risk advisory. Following the outbreak of full-scale civil war in Yemen on May 26, 2015, many foreign companies that operated in Yemen were forced to leave behind valuable assets underwritten by insurance companies.

In many instances, Houthi leaders proved useful in helping to negotiate the safe release of these assets. As when we first met, my Houthi contacts were often polite and eager to assist, motivated by a deep desire to maintain an outlet to the outside world. Today, many Houthis are motivated by a similar desire to remain on good terms with neighboring states and avoid getting drawn into regional conflicts, particularly on behalf of Iran.

According to one high-ranking Houthi military source operating within the Third Military Region in Marib, “the Houthis are a Shi’a group, however outside their northern stronghold of Sa’ada…many of those fighting with the Houthis are Sunni tribesmen who joined the movement to secure support in local disputes against their rivals. Many of these fighters have switched their allegiance over the years from Ali Abdullah Saleh, to the Islah party, to the Houthis. If they don’t get paid, they could switch allegiances again.”

Speaking on condition of anonymity for this piece, one top official within the Office of the Commander of the Houthi 6th Infantry Brigade in Taiz confirmed to me that the month-long delay in Houthi strikes on Israel was driven by a desire to secure payment from Saudi Arabia.

“The issue of Saudi payments to the Houthis [is] contentious… Our frontline forces are underfed and barely have any ammunition or fuel; they’re barely holding on…The leadership waited before receiving its latest payment from Saudi before doing anything that might anger them.”

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What I’m Watching

To forecast what happens next, it’s helpful to think of the Houthis as caught between their main patrons: threatening Saudi oil exports from Yanbu would jeopardize their financial lifeline. And alienating Tehran would cut off their main source of weaponry.

Last night’s dramatic Iranian escalation against Saudi petrochemical facilities in Jubail raises the stakes of the war significantly along with the possibility that Riyadh might join the US-Israeli war effort directly.

Doing so might serve as the final trigger that forces the Houthis to pick sides in the war. On more than one occasion, Houthi leaders have set Riyadh’s participation in US-Israeli strikes on Iran as a red line that would force the group to close Bab al-Mandab. Most recently, on April 06, 2026, senior Houthi official Muhammad Ali al-Houthi claimed the group would refrain from attacking Saudi Arabia so long as Riyadh “adheres to de-escalation.”

That said, the odds that the Houthis will resume attacks on commercial shipping or close Bab al-Mandab should be revised down to track more closely with the likelihood of Saudi Arabia and the UAE joining the war against Iran. Currently, Polymarket puts the odds of both countries doing so at 8% and 6%, respectively.

The best sources to follow for updates include the daily “Iran Report” by the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats project, which does a great job at cataloguing every kinetic strike in the region. For minute to minute updates, great X accounts to follow include @OSINTdefender, the Yemeni @SanaaCenter think tank, and Times of Israel correspondent @manniefabian.

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* Andrew Asani is the pseudonym of an OSINT-HUMINT researcher who tracks extremist patronage networks across the Middle East, including Syria, Yemen, North Sinai, Libya and Sudan. He advises clients performing strategic advisory and litigation support, and his work has been featured in numerous academic journals and news outlets.

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Disclaimer

Nothing in The Oracle is financial, investment, legal or any other type of professional advice. Anything provided in any newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not meant to be an endorsement of any type of activity or any particular market or product. Terms of Service on polymarket.com prohibit US persons and persons from certain other jurisdictions from using Polymarket to trade, although data and information is viewable globally.

On March 2nd, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote this about the Iran war:

These are some fancy words. But at Polymarket, we prefer to put numbers to the proverbial kaleidoscope.

That’s why today, we are releasing our first set of tools for writers to get the most out of our free, high-quality data.

Introducing Polymarket Journalism Tools.

Here’s how they work:

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See Headlines that Moved the Odds

Looking to understand why the odds evolved in the way they did? The Market Timeline plots the price history of a market with news stories highlighted at the points where odds underwent large changes.

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Given a specific market, use our Liquidity Checker to easily understand the volume, spread, trading history, and distribution of positions to verify that a market has received sufficient information to be governed by the wisdom of crowds.

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Send us a Liquidity Request which our markets team will review and, if approved, will increase the liquidity rewards for that market. This incentivizes new market makers to enter the market and improve the price signal.

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A series of questions will help you structure your idea into a tradable polymarket. Your suggestions go straight to the markets creation team.

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Skip to the exact second that odds moved to understand what moments actually mattered.

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If you are a journalist, researcher, or author working with Polymarket data, we’d love to hear from you.

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Disclaimer

Nothing in The Oracle is financial, investment, legal or any other type of professional advice. Anything provided in any newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not meant to be an endorsement of any type of activity or any particular market or product. Terms of Service on polymarket.com prohibit US persons and persons from certain other jurisdictions from using Polymarket to trade, although data and information is viewable globally.

Follow RememberAmalek on X | Join his PolySquare Discord

RememberAmalek aka @gaypride is one of Polymarket’s most storied and least filtered traders, with over $1.3m in profits since mid-2024. We last caught up with him during the New York mayoral election, where he spotted the electoral upside of ‘narcissistic psychopathy’ when Zohran Mamdani was trading at just 8%.

Amalek is also a serious student of Middle East history and has been turning his attention to the Iran war. The Oracle caught up with him to discuss drivers of the conflict, and how bad things could get.

This interview has been edited for length. All answers are his own.

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You lost money fading the Iran strike, then had a big catchup. What happened?

My logic on basically all of the strike markets is just like, default NO until something happens, because the returns are often pretty good on the short term. And I really didn’t think it was going to happen. I knew they were sending assets, I knew the same things everyone knew. There was the talks and all the geopolitical noise. Some sounded like it was going positively, some negatively.

My main belief was just around the midterms being so close. We are really not that far from the midterm. It’s pretty likely this will spill at least deep into summer and end up being a very relevant point in the midterm. And you know, Senate terms are quite long, so if you start talking about Iowa going blue, Texas going blue, Alaska and all these various places, that’s just very consequential for an extended period of time in American politics.

When the strike happened, I lost a bunch on the NO positions. Then I made it all back and more on Khamenei being out of power. That’s the other half of the strategy. When you’re wrong on the fade, you have to be ready to flip. That’s where I think I have a real edge over a lot of people on this site.

How do you think about Trump’s psychology here? What motivated him to do this?

I would lean into the kind of megalomaniac, narcissist camp. I’m not really anti-Trump but I think probably he’s doing the same thing he did in his first term, leaning on the same people he knew from decades ago in New York. You know, many of those people are American Zionists. Kushner, Witkoff, many of these people. Trump is very, very reliant on the last guy that he talked to.

How should traders be thinking about Iranian escalation? What are you actually watching?

The mistake most people make is watching the American and Israeli side for signals. That’s where everyone is looking. I think it’ll be much easier to tell, and this is something that is kind of central to trading on Poly, by following the Iranian side of the conversation where things are actually escalating.

There’s tiers with anything. You know, there’s closing the strait, but then there’s how they’ve closed the strait. There’s hitting a couple tankers here and there and spiking insurance, versus hitting tanker after tanker after tanker. There’s hitting facilities in Fujairah on the UAE coast. There’s hitting the [Saudi] East-West pipeline. They have material for dirty bombs at a minimum. A fatwa from a senior Shia figure would be significant. They haven’t done any of that, and that says a lot.

What are the most important sources you’re following now for signal or anti-signal?

This is one of the most important things for anyone trading these markets right now. Israel went viral on Polymarket during the 12-day war. So there’s a huge amount of Israeli money on this platform. It’s already been at minimum an eight-figure transfer of wealth from Western traders to people following Israeli news; Israeli media was a lot more optimistic about the strikes than media in the west. For the strike markets and the Khamenei markets, all the supposed Polymarket sharps were heavily on the no side. The Israelis cleaned them out. A lot of those Israeli traders now have significantly more capital to throw around.

The problem is Israeli news is not what most of those traders think it is. Israel does not have a free press in the Western sense. They have a military censorship bureau and a press that is deeply interwoven with the defense establishment. Sometimes that means genuinely excellent advanced intelligence. Other times you get deliberate disinformation in service of Israeli military objectives. And the Israelis trading on this platform trust their news completely. They don’t see the other side of it.

Any specific stories that come to mind as being clearly bogus?

The News 12 report claiming it was the UAE that had struck Iranian desalination infrastructure. That was zero percent. The Emirates are a merchant state. They are not going to strike Iranian desalination sites 20 miles from their own coast when they’re so reliant on desalination themselves. The Israelis would love to get Gulf states visibly involved in a coordinated operation against Iran. That’s their dream scenario. So when that report dropped and the market spiked to 90 cents with real size, I was in hard on the other side. That’s wartime propaganda serving Israeli strategic interests, full stop. You don’t need to know anything else.

On the other end, when Israeli reporters were saying Mujtaba was going to be the next Supreme Leader, they’re not getting that wrong. How embarrassing would that be? Their whole posture is “we know everything about you.” The core of their intelligence reporting, from a handful of trusted reporters, is very, very good. Parsing the difference between those two types of reporting is where the money is right now.

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Any interesting wallets you are watching here?

One big one is @thequietrisk. I think he has close to a 100% hit rate right now on the major calls. He was sizing up on these correlated positions in crazy size. I was fading him at first, like, come on, this guy’s nuts. He ended up hitting them. He also got the Hamas ceasefire right back in October, got in ahead of time when there was really no public talk of it. Every time I look at his wallet I think this guy is nuts and then he hits it. He’s big on Reza Pahlavi coming back too. I keep an eye on him.

Do you have a theory about what the US and Israel are actually trying to do here?

The IRGC was designed to be the vanguard of the revolution, the insulating protective force of the entire Iranian revolutionary structure. But it’s also extraordinarily wealthy. The profitable sectors of the Iranian economy are essentially controlled by them. And that creates a vulnerability. Wealth and ideology are not always compatible over time.

I think the American and Israeli strategy, though I can’t confirm this, is a selective decapitation program. Not just kill everyone, but kill the people who are hardliners and leave the people who are more conciliatory. You look at who they’ve targeted and who they’ve left around and it’s hard not to see a pattern. There are relatively senior figures who are still around, while two layers down their command chain have been killed. How do you explain that if not selection? They did the same thing in Afghanistan with the Taliban. They waited years for Mullah Omar to pass away, conducted an airstrike on the next guy, and the next guy after that was one they could work with.

But the decision to kill Khamenei was very strange. Very, very bizarre. Here’s the thing that almost nobody is talking about. By most accounts I’ve been able to piece together, Khamenei was actually one of the only senior figures in the Iranian regime who was genuinely opposed to nuclear proliferation. He was opposed to taking that final step. The entire regime has been absorbing all the downside of having a nuclear program, the sanctions, the isolation, the economic damage, and none of the upside of actually having a deterrent. That was a concession to the hardliners in the regime but the lack of going all the way, that was largely his opposition.

So when you kill the one guy who was restraining their nuclear program, you have to ask what the logic is. Either you have very high confidence in who replaces him and what concessions you can extract, or you wanted a justification to keep drawing the Americans deeper in. I don’t know which it is. But it is one of the most consequential decisions of the whole war and I don’t think it’s being analyzed correctly by almost anyone.

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What about the opposition inside Iran? There was this view that we’re going to take out the regime and that will facilitate protesters taking over. Do you buy that?

Yes and no. The Iranian regime is actually fairly unpopular, especially in Tehran among the urban elite. That’s different from a lot of places where the capital is your base of support. In Iran the support for the regime is more in the rural Persian core.

But here’s the problem. There is no organized opposition that could serve as a catch-all. The MEK is a cult. It’s just a very weird organization, nobody actually likes it inside Iran. P-JAK is basically just a front for the PKK, which means it’s a foreign Kurdish operation. The Khuzestani separatists, come on, that’s just the Iran-Iraq War redux. Any of these separatist movements, Kurdish, Arab, Baluch, are going to repel the nationalist population, which is real and significant. Iran has a strong national identity, they see themselves as a great power. If your opposition network is entirely made up of separatist ethnic groups trying to break off pieces of the country, you’re not going to win the nationalists. That’s been a persistent strategic failure of the Israeli and American approach to Iran for decades.

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Is the U.S. military capable of winning a ground war in Iran?

When you start to look at the US military and realize it’s not as strong as everyone thinks, it’s really a big deal. The whole Cold War justification was, okay, we might not make more fighters than the USSR but our fighters are better. Then we finally see interstate conventional conflict in Ukraine and it turns out that wasn’t really true either. It’s ahead sometimes, behind at others. And the US has zero cultural appetite for taking losses.

Iran looks at that and sees an opportunity. If they can make this costly enough, spike oil, cause a recession going into midterms, they can potentially break the political will on the American side. That is genuinely their strategic play. It’s not crazy. It worked in Vietnam. The question is whether they have enough runway to execute it before the Israelis and Americans finish what they started. Because if the Iranians end up holding out long enough and making this a high enough cost, and you see a withdrawal, there’s no one coming to replace American presence in the region. The Europeans aren’t coming. Nobody’s coming.

If this shit escalates from here, there’s a very real possibility this ends up being just a really, really, really big war. I don’t think Korea or Vietnam would really be as consequential as this could end up being. You have the global oil supply at stake. You have a potential nuclear proliferation moment. You have the existence of Israel and rule of the Sauds and Gulf monarchies in general endangered. You have the credibility of the entire US-backed regional order on the line.

If Iran weathers this and the Americans withdraw, the Israelis are a weaker country than they think, they live in the shadow of the Six-Day War but forget Yom Kippur where Golda Meir was issued cyanide capsules, nuclear bombers were readied, and a last stand in the Golan is what saved the Galilee. The Egyptians don’t like that peace deal. The Gulf states are hedging. They are just waiting to see which way this goes. The whole regional architecture is dependent on American credibility and willingness to stay engaged. If that breaks, you’re going to see a very different Middle East very quickly.

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Disclaimer

Nothing in The Oracle is financial, investment, legal or any other type of professional advice. Anything provided in any newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not meant to be an endorsement of any type of activity or any particular market or product. Terms of Service on polymarket.com prohibit US persons and persons from certain other jurisdictions from using Polymarket to trade, although data and information is viewable globally.

Follow Terry on X

In June 2024, Polymarket launched markets on how many times Elon Musk would post to X in a given week.

Elon tweet futures have since become a micro asset class, growing from $136k to $46.5m of volume in the last week of February 2026 - a 342X increase.

Watching the markets trade over several weeks, I began to obsess over a question:

Is there any edge here?

Or was this just a random walk through the mind farts of a dopamine addled billionaire?

Could I model Elon’s tweets?

After pulling all 86 weeks of historical market data and coding a tool: elonXforecast.com, the answer surprised me:

Elon’s tweeting habits are quite predictable.

I identified three key factors that give a tradable edge in these markets: momentum, weekly pacing, and outlier news events.

Looking back at the data gives a window into Elon’s recent arc. We see a steady uptrend through the 2024 election, a blowoff top in the DOGE era, and a second surge in late 2025 as Musk pivoted back to Tesla, xAI and SpaceX.

But enough about the past.

Let’s predict the future:

Factor 1: Momentum

It should be clear from the chart above that Elon’s tweet frequency does not make huge jumps from week to week: it exhibits momentum.

To quantify this we use a transition matrix.

Think of this as a cheat sheet: you look at how much Elon has tweeted this week (Low, Medium or High) and it tells you the probability of next week’s count based on past trends.

In the chart above, we see that a “Low” week (0 - 199 tweets) has a 61% probability of being followed by another “Low” week. A 39% chance of stepping up to “Medium” (200 - 399), and negligible odds of leaping to “High” or “Very High.”

Knowing that this week is likely to resemble the last, traders can check the prior week’s tier to have an idea of where the week will land, fading extreme buckets if the odds don’t support them.

It’s important to note that the sample size is very small on “Very High” (600+) weeks, with only 3 observations. The data is more robust in the low and medium tiers, where most weekly counts fall.

For “High” (400 - 599) and “Very High” weeks, the key takeaway is directional: volume tends to remain elevated once reached.

Factor 2: Mid-Week Pacing

The second tool we have for predicting tweet volume is the pacing curve.

By monitoring how many tweets have accumulated so far, we get a sense-check on whether the week is running hot, cold, or on pace.

This lets you project forward with confidence and spot when Polymarket prices lag behind the real data.

The diagram above shows the share of a typical week’s total tweets posted by day of the week over the last 14 weeks. What we see:

• Earlier in the week, when uncertainty is high (larger shaded blue area) the band is wide and projections are loose.

• By Tuesday, ~69% of the weekly total has usually been tweeted, narrowing the range significantly. If Tuesday’s count is 280 tweets and pacing shows 69% complete, the implied full-week total is 280 ÷ 0.69 ≈ 406 tweets. By cross-checking Polymarket odds, you can determine if it is within this probabilistic range or not.

The pacing curve is best used with the transition matrix: use the prior week’s tier as the starting expectation, then update it live with pacing curve data. If Tuesday’s pacing runs 20% above the average, the week is drifting towards the upper end of the matrix range and we may be heading for a breakout.

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Factor 3: The Woke Mind Virus

The first two factors are all about continuity.

But the life of Elon over the last two years has been anything but smooth: rocket explosions, political explosions, outbreaks of the ‘woke mind virus’ – these are all factors that can cause large moves in the tweet count.

The diagram above plots actual daily tweets against a moving average of the prior 14 days, highlighting periods where volume strays from recent norms.

The z-score tells us how far off today’s count is from the rolling 14-day average. A positive z-score indicates above-average spikes, while a negative one signals below-average dips.

I used a 14-day window to compute the rolling average. This is because the base rate of Elon’s tweets moves with events. This adaptive approach ensures outliers are flagged relative to the current “normal,” capturing surprises as trends shift. The below table shows the types of events that can cause outliers in the data:

Most of these departures, 85% to be exact, are positive outliers (volume spikes). Looking at the categories, we see some trends:

• “Woke Mind Virus” and other political commentaries tend to spark extended threads that can balloon the weekly total.

• Tech updates and election integrity topics are normally associated with lower tweet levels.

Is Alpha Available?

The above factors are all about what drives the final number of tweets each week.

But it doesn’t answer the big question: can I make money on this?

Are there consistent mispricings in the odds that tweet quants can capture?

The answer, happily, is Yes!

A look at the markets’ history shows that traders tend to overvalue longshots (low-probability outcomes) and undervalue favorites (high-probability outcomes).

In the diagram above, buckets in the 10-20% range have an actual win-rate of 7.4% despite being priced at 13.7%. Meanwhile, the buckets priced from 30-50% win ~43% of the time, more often than the implied odds of 34.9%.

This situation is well documented by Snowberg and Wolfers, who found out there is a tendency for markets to overprice longshot outcomes and underprice favorites. This is driven by how our brains process probability, rather than lack of information, a dynamic that persists even as volume scales up.

We can distill the insights into 2 actions:

• Buy NO shares on the 10-20% buckets at the start of week; or

• Buying YES shares on the 30-50% bucket.

However, the two strategies have very different risk profiles. The case study below shows why:

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Case Study: August 8, 2025. The Market Flip

It’s August 1st.

The market opens expecting a quiet week where “<215” is the favorite at 19%. The eventual winner, “470+” sits at 2.55 cents. Nobody is prepared for what is coming.

Then Grok Imagine launches and Elon blitzes the timeline with posts, adding more fuel to the raging Trump-Musk feud. By midweek, the tweet count blew past 200 and the market scrambled to reprice the upper bracket tweets.

A trader buying NO on every 10-20% bucket at the start of each week across 35 weeks would have placed 97 trades, won 90 of them (a 92.8% win rate).

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Putting it into Practice

Combining these gives us a three step workflow:

• Before the week begins, check the transition matrix to narrow which tiers are realistic. Buy the NOs where YES is at the range of 10-20%.

• As the week unfolds, track the pacing curve, by midweek, 69% of weekly volume is typically posted, enough to project a final total and compare that against Polymarket prices.

• If pacing diverges sharply from what the matrix predicted, check Elon’s feed for outlier trigger topics before sizing up or down. The idea is that you are buying NO shares on the ones that are systematically overpriced.

To make this easier, I’ve released the tool I created for this article:

https://elonXforecast.com/

It combines a live pacing curve with the Polymarket data from the current weekly tweet markets, giving you a real time dashboard for Elon tweet trades.

The good news is that, while these markets have grown massively in volume since launch, they are still not quite an institutional grade asset class so there’s likely a bit more time before the Jane Street guys show up.

Even still, 50 years of evidence suggests even they can’t fully arb away the longshot bias that has been a constant feature of even deeply liquid prediction markets.

Follow Terry on X.

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Disclaimer

Nothing in The Oracle is financial, investment, legal or any other type of professional advice. All odds are time sensitive and subject to change. Anything provided in any newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not meant to be an endorsement of any type of activity or any particular market or product. Terms of Service on polymarket.com prohibit US persons and persons from certain other jurisdictions from using Polymarket to trade, although data and information is viewable globally

The Oscars are finally here.

The glitz. The glamour. The predicting.

Our friends at Stand, a pro trading terminal for Polymarket, are back with a look at four traders you need to keep an eye on tonight.

Enter Stand…

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When we’re looking to find smart traders in a certain niche, we start with Polymarket Analytics (the best prediction market history book around) to look for historical winners in the ‘Oscars’ and ‘Awards’ categories.

Once you’ve found your traders, Stand is the place to watch their moves in real time as you can filter by category.

Trader #1: ImJustKen

Oscars Category PnL: $41,567 | Win Rate: 78.8% | Gains / Losses: $44,461 / $2,868

Awards Category PnL: $75,508 | Win Rate: 72.2% | Gains / Losses: $88,537 / $13,029

It’s well known that @ImJustKen (aka Domer) is a top Polymarket trader. But few appreciate his category-level dominance in the Oscars. He’s sitting on $41,567 PnL with a 78.8% win rate. That suggests he’s finding narrative shifts before the crowd catches on.

Example? Domer’s biggest position heading into the Oscars is Timothée Chalamet “No” for Best Actor. Looking at the chart, we can see how Chalamet’s odds have collapsed in the wake of his controversial takes on the beloved American art forms of ballet and opera.

Fading Chalamet is conventional wisdom now, but Domer was on this trade before it was priced in, and is sitting on nearly a 100% gain before the red carpet is even set up.

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Trader #2: wolfmoon

Oscars Category PnL: $4,514 | Win Rate: 61.9% | Gains / Losses: $7,749 / $3,235

@wolfmoon is going heavy on a One Battle After Another sweep: when one film dominates Best Picture, the adjacent categories (Director, Screenplay, Cinematography) tend to follow, and those markets are usually slower to price it in.

Game plan for Oscars night: watch the wallet to see if wolf starts trimming Best Picture while holding the side categories. If he holds or adds to both, he’s doubling down on One Battle running the table.

Current positions:

• Best Picture: One Battle After Another (Yes)

• Best Director: Paul Thomas Anderson (Yes)

• Best Actor: Timothée Chalamet (Yes)

Trader #3: @11122

Oscars Category PnL: $10,080 | Win Rate: 69.8% | Gains / Losses: $19,184 / $9,104

@11122 is playing another common strategy: holding a large consensus anchor position, plus a few longer shot side bets in the Best Supporting Actor polymarket.

If you see the wallet consolidating Supporting Actor positions into one name, that’s worth paying attention to.

Current positions:

• Best Supporting Actor (multiple legs)

• Best Picture: One Battle After Another (Yes)

Bonus: @weflyhigh (one to fade)

Oscars Category PnL: -$11,174 | Win Rate: 33.3% | Gains / Losses: $478 / $11,653

Under no circumstances should you copy trade @weflyhigh in entertainment markets. What we have here is a sports trader who wandered off the reservation. He crushes on hockey (#2 overall) and Olympics (#1 overall). Oscars? Not so much.

The silver lining: Stand’s copy/counter trade feature lets you filter by category, meaning you can ride weflyhigh’s athletic instincts and fade his film takes simultaneously. Some of his current Oscars holdings:

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Closing

You can follow all four traders on Stand with one click and get their trades in real time. For those looking to put these insights to work, Stand’s copy and counter trading tools make it easy to act on what you see.

Sunday morning is the calm before the storm.

If the Oscars market feels “ho-hum” right now, that’s the perfect time to watch who is adding to their position, and who is quietly heading for the exit.

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Disclaimer

Nothing in The Oracle is financial, investment, legal or any other type of professional advice. All odds are time sensitive and subject to change. Anything provided in any newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not meant to be an endorsement of any type of activity or any particular market or product. Terms of Service on polymarket.com prohibit US persons and persons from certain other jurisdictions from using Polymarket to trade, although data is viewable globally.

Jacob Savage is an LA-based writer whose essay “The Lost Generation,” an account of how DEI reshaped hiring across media and academia, was one of the most-argued-about pieces of 2025, garnering a 65 million view tweet and reshares from the Vice President.

If, like Jacob, you believe that identity politics and its attendant poor taste continues to drive Hollywood, then, why not use this knowledge to make some +EV Oscars picks?

It’s important, before thinking about this year’s Oscar contests, to remember that last year one of the worst movies of all time nearly won Best Picture.

Emilia Pérez wasn’t just bad — it was transcendently bad, a sort of maleficent sui generis achievement in its own right. It was, quite literally, Springtime for Hitler told earnestly: a film in which an evil Mexican drug lord undergoes gender reassignment surgery and becomes an Actually Really Good Caring Person. This was wokeness as filtered through the eyes of a clueless French Boomer, who seemingly had just discovered trans issues and cartel movies and musicals, and couldn’t believe his luck that no one had combined them yet.

Netflix (successfully!) positioned this terrible film as the anti-Trump Best Picture pick and of course the Academy ate it up. You could practically hear the acceptance speeches: “a film that transcends borders, sexualities, nationalities,” etc. The only reason the worst movie of 2024 didn’t sweep the Oscars is its transgender star was revealed to be something of a Nazi.

Bad movies have of course won Best Picture before. But Emilia Pérez represented something new: a bad foreign movie not just elevated by sentiment, but by politics and incompetence.

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How Did This Happen?

The answer, like so much else, goes back to 2015. That year only white actors were nominated for acting awards, the media freaked out, and #OscarsSoWhite was borne. In the aftermath, the Academy launched its A2020 initiative with the goal of doubling the number of women and people of color by 2020. What followed was an unprecedented expansion in membership, from roughly 6,000 in 2015 to over 11,000 today.

People focus on the increase in female and minority representation, but the real story is the internationalization of the Academy itself.

Nearly 3K (50%!) of new members since 2017 are not American. As anyone familiar with the old Hollywood Foreign Press Association can tell you, international bodies are invariably more corrupt, more manipulable, and more stupid than their American counterparts. The Academy is no exception.

Three of the lowest-grossing Best Picture winners in modern Oscar history have occurred since 2020 (Nomadland, CODA, and Anora). In 2020, the year Parasite won (which deserved it!), Polymarket fan favorite Uncut Gems wasn’t even nominated. Everything Everywhere All At Once — two hours of the same annoying set-piece — beat The Banshees of Inisherin and Tár and Top Gun. Oppenheimer had to gross $952 million for the Academy to acknowledge it.

So: Stop treating the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences like an American body with American tastes and norms. The key to Oscar alpha isn’t scraping box office data, or going to Bob’s Big Boy to hear a grip talking about how he overheard his DP say PTA is finished, or flying to Cannes to hear Zaslav explain why neither of his Best Picture nominees deserves to win. It’s to inhabit a different sensibility entirely.

Think instead like a new member of the Academy: you’re a middling European cinematographer with mediocre English and a limited understanding of American politics, and the keys to the kingdom have been deposited in your lap.

With that in mind, let’s get to the picks:

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BEST PICTURE

One Battle After Another isn’t a great movie. It’s not even really a good movie — that ridiculous, earnest ending, the feeling that tonally everyone is in a different film — but it is a beautifully-crafted major film that didn’t suck, and that counts for something. Plus PTA has been in the game forever; he’s basically owed an Oscar for Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood.

Sinners is more interesting. The industry has been telling itself for years that representation sells, and mostly it hasn’t, and along comes Ryan Coogler and makes it sell. He took what should have been a niche period horror film — Black musicians, Mississippi, vampires— and made a studio movie that didn’t lose money. In 2025, that’s a miracle.

For the Academy’s American members this feels like a genuine toss-up, with Sinners surging at the right time. But the foreign contingent doesn’t really know what to make of either of these films, which are both more culturally American than any frontrunner since Green Book, a movie so Boomer cringe it murdered the White Savior era for good. After all, the Euros don’t know the blues and don’t know the South. But they do have vague ideas about leftist radicals — Baader-Meinhof! Carlos the Jackal!— and a Serious Film by a Serious Filmmaker is internationally legible in a way that American genre films aren’t.

CONSENSUS: One Battle probably has the edge after all, along with PTA for Best Director.

UPSET: If you’re feeling frisky, and think the Europeans still feel personally responsible for the state of American race relations, Sinners makes sense. The trade coverage of Coogler’s contract negotiation — he secured ownership of the film through 2050 — has been framed as a racial empowerment narrative, as though Hollywood deal memos were a new chapter in the civil rights movement.

But keep PTA as Best Director.

BEST ACTOR

CONSENSUS: Chalamet has been campaigning hard and somewhat embarrassingly and seems to have crippled his own chances. A few weeks ago, when Michael B. Jordan was sitting at 7%, he looked like an excellent sleeper. Now that he’s above 50%, I’m not so sure. Because here’s the thing about the foreign contingent: they don’t love Timmy, and they don’t love Michael B. Jordan.

UPSET: What they love is Leonardo DiCaprio. The glitz, the glamour, the 22-year-olds. Leo is Hollywood for them, ever since they fell in love with cinema watching Titanic for the first time at the old cinémathèque. If the American vote fractures between Jordan and Chalamet, the Euros break for Leo. His stoned, washed-up revolutionary was the best thing in One Battle — and the Academy loves nothing more than rewarding a legend for playing against type. At 6%, he’s extremely undervalued.

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BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

CONSENSUS: The conventional wisdom is that One Battle is a sure thing: PTA will take Best Adapted Screenplay as the capstone if it sweeps the other awards, or as consolation if he doesn’t. But Hamnet has been showing signs of life (in LA circles, if not the Polymarket chart), and there’s no law that says consolation prizes land in the screenplay category. If One Battle underperforms, it will likely underperform here too.

UPSET: Hamnet is a film about the mysterious alchemy between suffering and art, which is just unbelievably Euro-coded when you think about it. Writers writing about writing, the more boring and treacly, the better. What foreigners do know is that they’re supposed to like Shakespeare, even if they don’t understand it (and here’s Chloe Zhao, admitting to not understanding it). At 3%, Hamnet is a steal.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

CONSENSUS: Similar “sure thing” situation in the Original Screenplay category, with Coogler supposed to take Best Original Screenplay as capstone if Sinners sweeps, or as consolation prize if he gets shut out of the major awards. But again, the foreign contingent doesn’t quite understand Sinners as a screenplay...not enough talking, too many vampires.

UPSET: At 2%, Marty Supreme is mispriced. The Euros, for what it’s worth, have no idea what’s going on in a writing category — which makes them true wild cards. Our hypothetical DP didn’t fly to Los Angeles to vote for a vampire movie.

BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE

CONSENSUS: Sentimental Value, The Secret Agent, and Sirat are all well-regarded, and Sentimental Value is the consensus favorite. Foreign films are the Academy’s new home turf, and the safe money says it wins.

UPSET: The vast majority of Academy members haven’t seen most of these films. If Sentimental Value, The Secret Agent, and Sirat split the cinephile vote, the political bloc gets its moment. The Voice of Hind Rajab — a docudrama reconstructing the final hours of a six-year-old Palestinian girl trapped under fire in Gaza — is currently sitting at 2% on Polymarket. It is a genuinely harrowing film. It is also a film that allows its winners to shout “Free Palestine” from the podium of the biggest awards show on earth.

Assuming a third of the Academy votes on politics — and Emilia Pérez‘s nomination suggests this may be a conservative estimate — and if the cinephile vote fractures, The Voice of Hind Rajab is a gift at 2%. Because we know how Euros feel about Palestine.

BEST DOCUMENTARY

CONSENSUS: The Perfect Neighbor is the heavy favorite — it’s a Netflix documentary, which means the Academy has already seen it, whether they wanted to or not. Mr. Nobody Against Putin feels like three wars ago. The Greenland flags have already gone up in Echo Park.

UPSET: The Alabama Solution is the best film in the category: real footage, real horror, prisoners filming their own abuse on contraband cell phones. The documentary branch has surprising taste. Unfortunately, the rest of the Academy, like the rest of us, has Netflix.

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Disclaimer

Nothing in The Oracle is financial, investment, legal or any other type of professional advice. All odds are time sensitive and subject to change. Anything provided in any newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not meant to be an endorsement of any type of activity or any particular market or product. Terms of Service on polymarket.com prohibit US persons and persons from certain other jurisdictions from using Polymarket to trade although information is viewable globally.

Jon Turek is a macro strategist who spent the last several years running a private advisory practice. His Substack Cheap Convexity relaunches today.

The Oracle caught up with him four days into the Iran-Israel war to discuss the implications of the conflict for macro markets and why prediction markets are becoming an essential tool for macro traders.

This interview has been edited for length. All answers are his own.

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Your Substack is called Cheap Convexity. What does that mean?

The way I think about cheap convexity is looking for things where you’re not risking a lot but could potentially make a lot. Sometimes those manifest as lottery tickets. But more precisely, it’s about finding situations where the market is priced for one very certain world-state, while a new part of the distribution is becoming highly relevant and the market hasn’t fully respected it yet.

If you’re wrong, the market just trades its base case, which is where it already is. But if you’re right, you get a nonlinear move because the whole distribution has to re-price.

Prediction markets are a perfect vehicle for this framework because the distribution is explicit rather than implicit. You’re already trading a percentage probability, so the asymmetry is right there in front of you.

Can you give a concrete example of this?

Last year, in February or March, I was writing to my institutional clients about a yield curve steepener in Europe. Germany was on the precipice of major fiscal stimulus, driven by the new political climate and the pressure for defense spending. At the time, the German 2-10 spread was sitting at zero basis points.

In a world where nothing happened, that curve would still likely steepen a little, because curves normally steepen during cutting cycles and the ECB was still cutting. But in the world where German fiscal spending materialized, you could combine further ECB cuts with a massive amount of fiscal stimulus and the curve could go much, much steeper. If I was wrong, maybe I lose 5-10 basis points on a slower-than-expected cutting cycle. But the curve was never going to trade negative 25 or negative 50 basis points, because that only happens in aggressive hiking cycles, and the ECB was cutting.

The curve ended up steepening from zero to 75 basis points. That’s the kind of trade I look for: high floor, new part of the distribution becoming live, market not yet appreciating it.

The alpha there wasn’t necessarily predicting the German fiscal package would happen. It was understanding what the market was pricing and where distributionally it could be surprised.

How does that framework translate to prediction markets? What would you have been watching on Polymarket around that trade?

There are two sides to this. On the input side, it’s becoming well documented that prediction markets influence traditional markets directly. Two years ago, during the first Israel-Iran flareup, energy traders were not really watching Polymarket. This time around, every energy trader had it up on their screen. That is now entrenched and will only grow as these markets get deeper.

On the output side, I think there’s a real opportunity to use prediction markets to speculate on macro variables directly. The Fed funds markets on Polymarket are already deep enough that a smaller institutional player could put real size in.

But beyond that, you can pick and choose the exact part of the distribution you want to express. Two years ago if I wanted to bet on where US 10-year rates would be, I’d have to back into it through options pricing on futures. Now I can just look at Polymarket and see: what’s the probability the Fed is at 2.75% next year? I don’t need to reverse-engineer it from a call spread.

You’re in Israel and living through this conflict in real time. What are the most relevant Polymarket contracts for macro traders right now?

The obvious ones are ceasefire timing and Hormuz closure. Every energy trader has those up on their screen. But the more interesting trades to me are the second-order effects.

The one I’ve been playing with is Israel-Saudi normalization by end of year. That market has moved from 10% to 25% over just the last couple of days, as the market starts to appreciate that if Israel emerges as the regional security guarantor, normalization stops being a choice and starts being a matter of necessity.

Muslim countries have actually received more Iranian missiles in this conflict than Israel has. That’s a fact that permanently changes regional calculations. I think normalization is basically a matter of when, not if, at this point. The shekel would rally hard on that news, and I don’t think shekel traders are fully pricing a 25-30% probability of that outcome.

The other second-order I’ve been thinking about is whether this conflict mechanically increases the probability of a Russia-Ukraine ceasefire. The munitions constraint becomes more binding when you have multiple fronts open simultaneously. The US is acutely aware that you don’t want too many active conflicts while the Asia risk around China-Taiwan is always in the background. Ceasefire odds for Ukraine have come way off this year, but I think a prolonged conflict here actually makes a deal more likely, not less.

Why hasn’t China-Taiwan risk gone up? My instinct was that a distracted US would be an invitation.

The problem for China is that they’re the world’s biggest energy importer, and 20% of their LNG comes from Qatar, which is right in the middle of this. Aggressively moving on Taiwan in the middle of an energy shock is not the backdrop you’d want. They have reserves, they’re well managed, it’s not that they’ll run out. But energy is their structural weakness.

It’s not a simple time for China right now. That’s probably why you haven’t seen the geopolitical risk premium spill over into Taiwan contracts the way an armchair strategist might have expected.

On Hormuz closure. Our recent interview with Doomberg made the point that the real question isn’t whether it closes, but how long it stays closed. Duration is what matters.

That’s exactly right, and I’d go one step further. Right now the Hormuz contract is effectively a ceasefire question. The strait is technically open, it’s just that nobody rational wants to sail through it.

The more pressing issue for financial markets is impairment. If there’s a ceasefire tomorrow but a Qatari LNG facility has been damaged, the strait can be open and you still have a massive energy shock. I saw an engine facility in Bahrain get hit. Any physical impairment of infrastructure makes this a much more lasting event even if the shooting stops.

I think there should be better Polymarket contracts around this. Qatar Energy has a contract starting to get some volume, and that’s exactly the right direction. The area under the curve, what’s the cumulative supply disruption, matters more than the point-in-time closure question.

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What feels most mispriced to you right now, on Polymarket or in traditional markets?

A few things stand out. First, the European Central Bank hiking rates this year. A week or two ago, the probability of an ECB hike was essentially zero. I think it’s now becoming possible we see more than one hike. Europe is extremely dependent on Qatar LNG. They’ve been weaned off Russian energy. They’re coming out of winter with dangerously low gas inventories. Their tolerance for even short-lived inflationary episodes is very different from other central banks, and their mandate is their mandate. The market has not fully digested this.

I’ve also been working up a piece on Christine Lagarde leaving the ECB chair by end of 2026 . I think that’s materially underpriced. The French presidential election next April has real potential to go right-wing, and Lagarde would not want a new right-wing French president to have influence over who her successor is. She has strong incentive to exit on her own terms before that happens.

On Europe, do you see political ramifications beyond the ECB? Starmer, other European leaders at risk?

The UK seems to be coming out of this the weakest politically. Starmer came into this episode already pretty weak, and I think the political ramifications will be relevant there. The more interesting one to watch going into next year is the French presidential election in April 2027. That’s going to be a massive event for both traditional financial markets and for Polymarket. It’s the kind of thing that should be on every macro trader’s radar right now.

What’s your broader view on how this conflict ends, and what Iran looks like on the other side?

The constraint on this war, as Blinken once put it, is markets and munitions. Trump is not going to be running this campaign with oil at $120 going into midterms. The hawks in the administration might say: we can wrap this up in six weeks and have oil back at $55-60 by then, and everything is fine. That’s the scenario they’re gaming. What they’re calling the “Donroe Doctrine” is that the administration moves swiftly in military episodes and gets out.

On what Iran looks like after: I’m actually a bit more optimistic about regime change than most people I talk to. The key difference from Iraq is that the Iranian population has demonstrated repeatedly that they want change. You have these massive protests every few years. If you’re trying to convince a population that life could be better, that’s an easier trade in Iran than almost anywhere else in the region because a large majority of the population already believes it.

The modal outcome is probably some messy internal proxy conflict between the IRGC trying to hold on and US and Israeli-backed groups. But I think about the Egypt model after the Arab Spring: messy at first, then you get your guy in. That outcome seems more achievable in Iran than a lot of other US-led regime change efforts, precisely because the popular will is already there.

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You’ve been talking about prediction markets as tools for hedging, not just trading. Can you explain that?

This is something I want to use Cheap Convexity to really hammer on. Right now, the only businesses that hedge energy prices are large corporations: airlines, energy companies. A small manufacturer with real exposure to oil prices has no practical way to hedge a tail scenario.

But functionally, a prediction market event contract is just an option on an event or a price level. If you’re a small business that gets badly hurt if oil goes to $120 but doesn’t really care whether it’s at $60 or $80, you can buy a contract that pays out at $120 for, say, a 5-7% premium. That’s exactly what Goldman Sachs would structure for a Fortune 500 client, just with more zeros. You don’t need to pay for markets to chop around in their normal range. You only want exposure at the tail, because that’s where you actually get hurt.

The same logic applies to currencies. I live in Israel and earn dollars. Dollar-shekel has moved about 20% in two years. That’s a meaningful change in my cost of living. I would pay a small premium to own the tail of that. Every real business has currency risk, interest rate risk, energy risk. None of them are solving for it at the small business level. Prediction markets are the obvious answer.

What’s the path to getting there?

It’s partly educational and partly just time. A 50 or 60-year-old business operator might look at this and think it’s a phase, the same way some people wrote off crypto early. But as younger people build businesses and realize this tool exists, I don’t see why it wouldn’t grow. It’s a function of awareness and time.

The market structure question is also important. You need retail flow first, then market makers follow. Once market makers are there, institutional risk-takers can come in at real size because the liquidity exists. The chicken-and-egg problem resolves itself, but retail has to come first.

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What prediction markets would you most like to see added?

Non-Fed interest rates, especially the 10-year, because that’s the economy-sensitive rate most businesses actually borrow against. Longer-term currency pairs beyond the major dollar crosses, especially ones with high geopolitical sensitivity.

On energy specifically, I’d love to see more granular infrastructure contracts around LNG facility impairment and tanker availability, rather than just the binary open/closed Hormuz question. The area-under-the-curve problem needs better market expressions.

And honestly, five-minute oil markets. I know that sounds like pure gambling, but bootstrapping retail liquidity through short-duration products is how you eventually get to the institutional-sized hedging markets. You need the retail activity to attract the market makers. That’s how market structure develops.

Follow Jon Turek on X and read Cheap Convexity on Substack.

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Disclaimer Nothing in The Oracle is financial, investment, legal or any other type of professional advice. All odds are time sensitive and subject to change. Anything provided in any newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not meant to be an endorsement of any type of activity or any particular market or product. Terms of Service on polymarket.com prohibit US persons and persons from certain other jurisdictions from using Polymarket to trade althought information is viewable globally.

is a pseudonymous team of former commodities executives publishing one of the top Substacks on energy, finance, and geopolitics under the iconic green chicken avatar.

The Oracle caught up with Doom on March 4, as the Iran-Israel war entered its fifth day, to discuss missile attrition, laser beams, what the Brent-WTI spread is telling us, and which Gulf Arab state he’s watching most closely.

This interview has been edited for length. All answers are Doomberg’s own.

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The last time we spoke, we talked about your thesis that World War Three was a monetary struggle for the future of the US trading and energy system. Are we moving to the hot phase now?

In our view World War III started in 2014, when Putin sold his US Treasuries and placed the proceeds in gold. The war in Ukraine, which started in 2022, is the biggest hot battle before this one. And the Iran war is the latest battle in that same conflict. The economic trade war between China and the US is another battle. Iran is a BRICS state, a key supplier of crude to China, and an on-again, off-again ally of Russia.

There’s only really one battle left after this: US versus China over Taiwan. The world is in a very precarious place right now.

Your WWIII thesis suggests that Trump initiated this to knock out China’s energy suppliers, Venezuela and now Iran. But I’m hearing other arguments that Israel was dragging in the US. Where do you come down?

Look, Donald Trump’s the President of the United States. The buck stops with him. He’s the person that the US public has elected, and his party will stand for election in the 2026 midterms, and whoever wins the Republican nomination will be held to account and/or rewarded for whatever happens in the weeks ahead. Every country in the world is trying to influence the President of the United States for obvious reasons. Even if that’s true, it doesn’t matter to us.

One of the hallmarks of a lateral thinker is an ability to separate an emotional attachment to the correctness of an axiom from whether or not it is currently working to explain events. And I would argue that the energy axiom: that the US is in the middle of World War Three, and energy is at the core of all wars, and China gets its energy from Venezuela and Iran and Russia, and the US just happens to be in various stages of war with Russia, Venezuela, and Iran, I just find it very difficult or implausible to believe that this is all some Israeli-driven set of coincidences. And so yeah, we firmly are in that second camp.

What are the four or five most salient sources you’re looking at on a daily basis to understand what’s going on?

The primary things I’m looking at, because there’s just such a thicket of propaganda out there, are market indicators, things like Polymarket, but also the energy market. The energy markets are incredibly sophisticated. There’s billions of dollars on the line to getting these things right.

Over the weekend, I decided to try an experiment. I personally bought a new clean iPad and created some new login credentials and a fresh email and downloaded the Twitter app. And I spent an hour training the algorithm that I was pro-Iranian, anti-American. I wanted to see what that side of the world was telling itself. And two amazing things already a few days in: it’s a wholly different universe. Shockingly so. The standard Doomberg Twitter for-you feed versus that feed might as well be on different planets. The parallel universe theory of physics is alive and well on Twitter today.

Then yesterday, something significant happened and that feed was basically turned off. You can no longer find alternative views to what’s actually going on in Israel on Twitter in the way that you could in the first 48 to 72 hours after the war started. You actually have to live it to see it. With the snap of a finger, a switch was flipped.

Every single morsel of information Twitter is feeding you is being shaped, controlled, or influenced by somebody. That’s where I think markets do help. It costs money to manipulate markets, especially extremely liquid markets like oil and natural gas.

Beyond that, the only thing we’re really looking for now, three or four days into the war, is the answer to one simple question: Is Iran still firing advanced missiles and drones?

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What about the missile laser system Israel apparently deployed on night one? Does that change the interceptor equation?

On the laser stuff, lasers are very energy intensive, and there’s only so much energy in Israel. They get it from natural gas. And those natural gas fields, if Iran is capable of launching missiles with targeting indefinitely, then it comes down to a missile defense war versus a missile offense war.

I saw Pete Hegseth out talking about essentially carpet bombing Iran. That’s not going to win the war. You could blow up as many homes as you want in Iran but you need to get these launchers. The US carpet-bombed Germany for how long in World War Two?

It’s going to be a lot of deaths, a lot of suffering. That’s not going to win the war. It’s going to make for great TV and convince people that the war is being won. But what really matters is: can Iran still launch advanced missiles and drones? Today is day five. They still can.

Let’s talk about the Gulf oil infrastructure. I’m surprised you’re focused on whether Iran can launch missiles at Israel rather than on what they might do to Gulf oil facilities and the Strait of Hormuz.

No, it’s wherever they decide to shoot them. They’ve made some decisions about where to shoot. They’ve kept some escalation in reserve. They may have effectively closed the strait, but they have not yet blown up Ras Laffan, for example, which is Qatar Energy’s export terminal. They lobbed a few drones that way to prove they can, and the company has preemptively shut it down and declared force majeure. But that infrastructure could be turned back on if the war ended tomorrow.

There’s a world where that restraint ends and Iran just blows up the Saudi oil fields, the export terminals, the oil pipelines, Qatar’s LNG export capacity. They’ve not yet done that. The missiles launched into the Arab countries, in many ways, is more important than what’s going on in Israel. Huge amount of censorship in those countries too. All eyes on Bahrain.

Ok, let’s get to the markets. Strait of Hormuz closure at 78% through March 31

As you’ve defined it, the strait is already effectively closed. I suppose we just need to get to the seven-day moving average. But there’s no value in betting it either way at 78% by March 31. I think that’s probably a fair price, because there’s a chance that the war resolves before then and the strait won’t have been closed by that seven-day moving average definition. And it does take seven days to get a seven-day moving average.

What about duration? How long does this go on?

Obviously everybody’s modeling this exact question. The thing we played around with yesterday is it’s not just oil and gas that go through that strait, but an awful lot of food and fertilizer too, and both ways.

How much food is actually in the Gulf Arab states allied with the US where the US currently has bases? How much food is in Bahrain? How much food is in Saudi Arabia? I mean, it’s quite literally the direct question. Nine meals to crazy isn’t just a prepper phrase.

We have not yet seen escalatory strikes on the desalination facilities across the Middle East. Those are milestones and markers we’d be looking for. That kind of tells us this war can’t go on for much longer. I don’t think the strait can be closed for two or three weeks.

We’re punching up a piece for this weekend on just what a precarious situation the European Union is in. Here we are again, five years after the beginning of the first energy crisis. Europe is coming out of the winter of 2025-26 with dangerously low gas inventories, still cutting off Russian imports, and the LNG markets are on fire. This can’t go on.

Iran’s strategy seems to be: launch targeted missiles and numerous drones every day, drip drip drip, and run the clock out on the global economic capacity to absorb this hit. Whether that’s successful or not is the only thing that remains to be seen.

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Qatar Energy LNG resumes production by March 14. That was briefly above 90% this morning and crashed. What happened there?

That was the force majeure tweet from the official Qatar Energy account, which came out at 7:24am Eastern this morning. One wonders whether the announcement to suppliers went out earlier than the tweet, which would make sense.

Force majeure means: for reasons beyond our control, we are unable to satisfy our contractual obligations, and because this was outside of our control, we’re insulating ourselves from damage claims. Even if the war is resolved, it doesn’t necessarily mean production will resume right away. You have workers evacuating. It takes time to safely shut down these things and then safely bring them back online. That’s a pretty tight schedule for March 14.

Ceasefire by March 31 is only at 38%. Does that feel right?

If there’s only a 38% chance of a ceasefire by March 31, the world is going to be in a very different place. And if this war is still as hot on March 31 as it is today, oil and gas are mispriced.

The TACO trade is in the back of my mind too. The market might believe that Trump declares victory and goes home, like he did after the June 12-day war, obliterated Iran’s nuclear capabilities, declared victory. But we’re pretty far down that branch now, and his base is so split over the war. I don’t know how that happens. But the market is kind of indicating that’s at least one of the possibilities.

The other outcome is regime change, revolution, chaotic dissolution of Iranian society. One of those two outcomes would need to happen in the next couple of weeks, because I don’t think the strait can be closed for two or three weeks.

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US ground troops / invasion of Iran, that’s been very spiky. Do you have a view on whether the US is serious about installing a government, or are they content to keep bombing with air power?

In reading the resolution rules, the market resolves yes if the US commences a military offensive intended to establish control over any portion of Iran. Now, there are portions of Iran that the Iranian government doesn’t really control, which is the Kurdish area in the West overlapping with Iraq and Turkey. And another way you could see significant US troops on the ground is along the banks of the strait, building a beachhead as a buffer zone to reopen the Strait of Hormuz specifically.

There’s also a history with the Kurds. If we were to insert boots on the ground, that would be a place to do it. “Any portion” is a very expansive definition. I’d say that contract at around 25% is being priced with a lot of time premium too, since it doesn’t expire until December 31.

Does Iran make China-Taiwan more likely? I’ve been surprised that this has been flat since this started.

In a world where Iran keeps firing missiles and the US runs out of interceptors, that would seem to be a pretty prime time for China to make a move on Taiwan. But China could also just embargo the island, cut off its hydrocarbons, and achieve its geopolitical objectives without a military clash. Is there a contract for “Will China try to embargo Taiwan before 2027”? Because that’s what I think they would do.

The two happiest people on the planet over this war are Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. Ukraine is not getting air defense missiles relative to what it could be getting, because there’s a whole bunch of them in the Middle East. There are reports, I don’t know if they’re true, that a THAAD system is being considered for movement from Korea into the Middle East. There were reports of THAAD-related assets being destroyed in Qatar yesterday.

China has been buying an extra million barrels a day of oil for a year. Russia has a lot of spare oil capacity. There’s an awful lot of oil sloshing around on the seas. And I saw reports that China is leaning on Iran to allow the strait to reopen — they desperately need that crude.

It would seem to open a narrow window of opportunity for China to make a move. If they don’t now, then when?

What are the energy markets telling us right now, and is it too early to play the Doomberg “sell the spike” normalization trade?

As we’re recording this, Brent is at $81 and LNG in Europe is at 16. Yesterday LNG in Europe was at 22 and Brent was kissing $85. That’s telling us the market is not anticipating $120 or $150 oil. The WTI-Brent spread is up from $5 to about $7.40, a 40% increase, but not a real crisis indicator yet. In a world where things really hit the fan, you could see that go to $10, $12, or $15. That would be our signal.

On the normalization trade: a little early. You don’t buy front-month puts — you buy year-out puts, because a year from now the price of oil is either going to be way lower than it is now, or it doesn’t matter because we’re all dead. This is kind of like Pascal’s Wager. Both oil and LNG in Europe are consolidating right now, telling us the market thinks there might be a path out of this war, even though we don’t see one. The market is probably right that this doesn’t go on indefinitely. The question is how much damage gets done before it stops.

Will other countries get involved? France is at 16% to strike Iran by March 31.

I think France will get involved. Macron has signaled he views this as an opportunity to reestablish French relevance on the geopolitical chess board. He’s sending an aircraft carrier there. He’s talking about spreading the nuclear shield of France around. But 16% for a strike on Iran specifically — that’s a question of definition. Involved versus strike Iran are different things.

Canada came out initially supportive then did a 180 yesterday. I was surprised.

This is something I’m really buying about Polymarket: the definition of resolution is really what you need. You can’t just look at the headline contract and say “that’s cheap.” You have to read the rules.

What polymarkets would you create now that don’t exist?

Regime change in Bahrain. I would load that one up right now. Bahrain is an 80% Shia majority Arab state. The US naval base has been badly damaged, wildly underreported in the West, and there are ongoing protests. The pro-Iranian strategic view is that achieving regime change in Bahrain would be the first domino to fall in the Arab states, which are largely ruled by unpopular monarchs. If we see regime change in Bahrain, that is a very important milestone that very few in the West even have on their radar or would understand the significance of.

Also: Houthi Bab-el-Mandeb closure. The Houthis have been less involved than one might have expected so far. The Iranian view is they’re holding back reserves for when air defense systems have been fully exhausted, so the impact of the Houthi offensive will be all the greater.

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Disclaimer: Nothing in The Oracle is financial, investment, legal or any other type of professional advice. All odds are time sensitive and subject to change. Anything provided in any newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not meant to be an endorsement of any type of activity or any particular market or product. Terms of Service on polymarket.com prohibit US persons and persons from certain other jurisdictions from using Polymarket to trade, although data and information is viewable globally.

“Belikewater” is the pseudonym of a professional forecaster with Sentinel Global Risks Watch, a nonprofit forecasting team focused on tail risks.

When we first spoke in June 2025, less than a week before Trump first hit Iranian nuclear sites in “Operation Midnight Hammer,” she gave Khamenei just a 15% chance of surviving the year in power.

While the timeline was off by a few weeks, Belikewater is known for anticipating Trump’s most aggressive moves when the conventional wisdom is hammering the TACO trade.

Four days into the Iran war, whether the Iranian regime survives is deeply uncertain. Forecasting research shows that aggregating forecasters with different methods and temperaments, known as “ensemble forecasting,” produces better outcomes than any one analyst.

The Oracle invited belikewater, and four other members of the Sentinel hive mind, for a panel interview on what happens next in Iran. The members:

• Belikewater, Sentinel’s most hawkish voice.

• Vidur Kapur, described by teammates as machine-like in his focus on the motivations and personalities of the key actors

• Nuño Sempere, Sentinel’s founder, the base-rate maxi of the group

• Misha Yagudin an AI founder currently in Tel Aviv, previously cofounded the Samotsvety Forecasting team, a predecessor of Sentinel

• “Ben” a top-ranked competitive forecaster with a hard science background.

This interview has been edited for length. All answers are their own.

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What was Sentinel’s last forecast before the strikes, and what were you thinking on Friday night?

Vidur: The last forecast we made was Monday of last week. We asked whether the US will strike Iran by March 8, by end of March, and by end of June. We were at 38% by March 8, 66% by end of March, and 79% by end of June.

By Friday I was telling some friends this is probably the weekend it’s going to happen. There were lots of embassy evacuations. The reason we expected it at all was the huge US military buildup in the region and Trump explicitly saying he was going for regime change. We still held out some hope that negotiations would succeed.

Nuño: One signal for me was the conflict between the Pentagon and Anthropic because they had this harsh 5 p.m. Friday deadline. Why do you have a very harsh deadline unless you need it urgently? I did post in our channel:

“I just put 2 and 2 together and realized that the Pentagon wants to use Anthropic’s models for something in Iran, maybe identifying military targets to automatically kill them. Otherwise it’s not that urgent.”

More generally, if you can credibly threaten to bomb Iran and kill the leaders, why wouldn’t they take a deal? I also thought the Iranian foreign minister was amazing at drawing things out, hoping Trump loses interest. You see something similar with Russia, where every time Trump gets upset they offer talks to stall.

Ben: I had assumed the US was willing to make a serious economic rapprochement with Iran. There were offers to provide nuclear fuel in perpetuity if Iran gave up its own facilities. These seemed like pretty serious concessions and Iran should be taking them seriously if they’re rational. But it’s hard to view the former Iranian leadership as particularly rational given that they did not manage to convince the US they were serious about a deal.

Nuño: It also seems that maybe the US was not dealing in good faith, making these proposals so that the Iranian leadership would have to meet to agree on whether to take them. They’d be meeting together so they could be bombed. That was a good chess move.

Belikewater: Axios today confirmed that the US and Israel originally planned to attack Iran a week earlier than they did, and that before the strikes, just like last year, the US and Israel wanted to signal there was no imminent strike so that Khamenei and the others would feel safe. It was the same playbook as Operation Midnight Hammer.

Meanwhile we had endless cargo flights coming into the Middle East. And the night before, there was a brief message to cargo planes that came into one of the bases in the Gulf instructing them to spend as little time as possible on the ground, with a statement that no further information could be given at this time. My antennae were going up by Friday night. The only question was when, and it was clear that Iran wasn’t going to negotiate on any of the critical points. So to me it was all but a done deal.

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Walk us through the last 48 hours. What surprised you? What were the US and Israel trying to accomplish?

Vidur: It’s difficult to tell what the US objectives are. On one hand Trump said the Iranian people should rise up and seize their freedom. On the other hand there are reports that Trump wants to negotiate with members of the regime, and some Israeli reporting suggests the US even thought about trying to get a ceasefire over the weekend. There’s a lot of contradictory stuff out there.

If I had to guess, he’s willing to cut a deal with members of the regime. I’m a bit below 50% on whether the regime will fall by end of June or end of 2026. I’m trying to correct for recency bias. We saw something similar in Venezuela where they took Maduro out but put his vice president in.

Generally the US has been reasonably good at regime changes when it wants to be over the past century. Libya and Yugoslavia are maybe the best parallels, both air campaigns. With Milosevic he was toppled a bit over a year later. With Gaddafi it was maybe nine months. With Afghanistan and Iraq you had ground forces helping.

Belikewater: It’s clear that the US did not have any major pre-arrangement with a successor figure the way they had with Delcy Rodriguez in Venezuela, because I think we would already know about that by now. They’re clearly winging it more. Sending a message across the country that people should rise up and get rid of the government.

Ben: I was surprised by the reported videos of Trump hacking onto state television to foment a coup. That kind of implies there’s not a plan to negotiate directly and have an immediate successor.

Also, we’re not really used to the US fighting wars that are surprising. We’re used to these long-term managed conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. When the US assassinates the head of a major country on the first day of fighting while simultaneously saying they’re negotiating to find a replacement and also pushing for regime change with information warfare, that’s just an unusual thing. But in warfare you’d expect to see things you’re very surprised by, because both sides should be behaving optimally. They should be surprising outside observers. That’s strategic.

Misha: Being in Tel Aviv with all the defensive infrastructure Israel has built feels quite safe. There have been very few direct hits on Israel. I spent a couple of nights at a small bunker downstairs. Today was much quieter than the first day.

One thing I learned early in the first day is that Israel apparently has Iron Beam, a precision laser capable of disabling around 10 drones per minute at a fairly large distance. The current problem with drones and interceptors is that defense is much more costly than offense. A drone can cost tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars, but with the laser you just spend electricity.

I was also concerned about whether a US aircraft carrier would be hit. If Iran sent a huge swarm of drones at once, you maybe can’t defend against it. This war is already unfavorably viewed especially among Democrats. Losing a major asset would have been a disaster. But this now seems almost nil probability.

What happens to the regime now? Walk us through the scenarios.

Belikewater: I think it’s most likely that the IRGC will remain in power to some extent. But there is almost zero chance we end up with another Ayatollah and clerical control remaining. I don’t think the Islamic Republic is going to continue in any real sense. I could envision a scenario where the Ayatollahs are shuffled off into the back room and given some title, but they don’t retain any actual power.

My best bet for who will lead the country is Ali Larijani. He and his brothers are the only ones who can really command enough power across enough domains. He has connections within the political core of the country, the religious core leadership, and the military leadership. He’s one of the only people who has a chance of holding it all together.

Overall, I think it’s most likely that the IRGC remains in some form, maybe with a new name, and we see a shift to secular control. Still a very conservative Muslim country. But clerical authority over the government will be gone.

Ben: I’ll take the opposite side. I still think there’s a very decent chance we don’t see any large-scale shifts and the general structure of the government remains more or less intact, even if the central leadership has to make some serious concessions to stay in power. Maybe the true balance of power shifts back to the more parliamentary and republican pre-revolutionary parts of the government. But as far as the actual structural form of the government, I don’t think we’re likely to see major changes even if there is a more US-favorable leader installed.

Nuño: You can also imagine something at the other extreme. You have a regime that has been closing mosques and there could be widespread preference falsification throughout the country supported by killing lots of protesters. Now you kill the leaders, you deal them a very harsh blow in terms of falsifying their religious beliefs, and the country just shifts. There was a survey back in 2020 showing that 30% of people were irreligious, and only ~40% identified as muslim. If you get 30% atheists or agnostics even under the previous regime, what’s the actual figure now that the leadership has been annihilated?

Belikewater: I would caution against concluding that declining mosque attendance equates with declining religiosity. The mosques were also mouthpieces of the government and people may have simply got tired of the mingling between government and religion. In fact I think it’s quite possible we could see mosque attendance grow once those things are decoupled. But certainly not everyone is as conservative as the regime’s version of Islam.

Ben: I’d say the odds of a color revolution, a public uprising where the form of government changes pretty dramatically, are maybe 15%.

Nuño: That’s even a bit higher than I would go, but it’s what Trump is hoping for.

Misha: We did see big protests in Iran following the 12-day war. There is a lot of civil desire for change both economically and politically. And given how successful the US and Israel coalition have been in removing key people in positions of power, they may have removed the people most ruthless and most willing to shoot protesters. This might make the next iteration of protest or a peaceful transition more likely.

Belikewater: On civil war. I think it’s hard to see what a civil war could actually look like in practice. The country is so fractured. There’s no clear opposition group with any real power. You could have some regional groups, Azeris, Baluchis, Kurds, fighting for autonomy around the edges. Or you could have more conservative factions aligned with the old regime fighting newer ones. But it’s not like there are clear rival power centers with independent armies. The IRGC has entirely subsumed the regular military.

And a giant problem even under a new government is that the economy has been so hamstrung by an enormous level of corruption that if they don’t address that, they’re still going to have massive problems with critical infrastructure. As soon as they drop the pursuit of nuclear weapons and a ballistic missile program, sanctions can go and that provides a tremendous boost. But corruption remains the giant underlying problem.

Let’s move to some specific questions. Will the Iranian Regime fall this year?

Belikewater: That definition is actually not about the IRGC disappearing. It’s about whether the IRGC is still under clerical control. So I think the IRGC will remain but not under clerical control. Almost zero chance we end up with another Ayatollah. I’d put this market at a fairly high probability for “Yes” under that specific definition.

Nuño: You could have interesting edge cases where it changes its name. Where do you draw the line?

Ben: As far as the actual structural form of the government I don’t think we’re likely to see major changes. So I’d lean “No” on that market, or at least below 50%. The modal scenario is the institutions remain more or less intact.

Vidur: I’m a bit below 50% on regime falling by end of June or end of 2026. Trying to correct for recency bias.

Reza Pahlavi enters Iran

Nuño: That seems a bit high, but you never know.

Belikewater: I see Reza Pahlavi as a has-been wannabe. His family is mostly done. There is some support for the monarchy within Iran, but I think by and large that’s not where most Iranians want to go. He’s been auditioning for the role of Iran’s pseudo-democratic leader, giving lip service to wanting democracy. But I don’t see him having enough support within Iran. The only way I could see him entering is if Iran normalizes relations with the West enough that the powers in Iran can’t really stop him, or if there’s some sort of civil war and the US says, “We have to put someone in, let’s get Pahlavi.” I think that’s unlikely.

Ben: I would take the under on that. The more interesting scenario is Iran normalizes relations with the West enough that Pahlavi is able to go there and international pressure makes it so the powers in Iran can’t stop him. Multiple ways that market could resolve “Yes.” But I think it has been too high.

Will the US invade Iran? Trump and Hegseth have been refusing to rule this out.

Belikewater: Way too high.

Ben: I’d put it closer to 5 to 10%. Special ops forces are probably already there, but for something larger than that, almost no chance.

Vidur: Maybe 10%. I think Trump not ruling it out is him trying to be unpredictable. But it would be a huge blow to his self-image and image among his supporters to actually send ground troops. His advisers would also push back tremendously against it. Libya is brought up even in MAGA circles as a failed regime change the establishment went into, and they’re not going to repeat that.

Nuño: Perhaps not wildly mispriced, because it’s not worth bidding down if you have to lock capital until the end of the year, but probably too high as a probability.

How long do the strikes go on?

Belikewater: Three to five weeks probably. But it’s all probabilistic. Could it stop tomorrow? Yes. If someone decides they want to negotiate, it could stop tomorrow.

Ben: I have a pretty flat distribution curve over the next few weeks. Could be in a few days, could be in four weeks, could be in six weeks. I don’t think it’s going to be a campaign going on for four months.

Vidur: The polymarket looks pretty reasonable. 51% by end of March looks quite reasonable. You can look at Libya or Yugoslavia to get a rough guess, but those were at least a couple of months, whereas this is basically up to Trump and Netanyahu. Trump could get impatient. I agree it’s probably weeks rather than three months.

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Disclaimer: Nothing in The Oracle is financial, investment, legal or any other type of professional advice. All odds are time-sensitive and subject to change. Anything provided in any newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not meant to be an endorsement of any type of activity or any particular market or product. Terms of Service on polymarket.com prohibit US persons and persons from certain other jurisdictions from using Polymarket to trade, although data and information is viewable globally.

On Friday, Feb. 20, the Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision to strike down Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, provoking a furious response from the Commander-in-chief across every social media account he could get his hands on.

But, had Trump been watching Polymarket, he may have come to the same conclusion that traders reached over 3 months earlier: the tariffs were likely doomed in the high court.

Today, we revisit the November 5th Supreme Court oral arguments on the legality of the tariffs, a 4 hour period in which the odds for the court to uphold the tariffs was roughly cut in half: from 46.5% to 24%, a price the contract held with slight fluctuations until the decision was released on Friday.

Using a new open-source tool to synchronize Polymarket odds with video, it is possible to pinpoint the exact moments during the hearings that moved the market.

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In the weeks leading up to oral arguments, conventional wisdom held that, due to the difficulty of “unscrambling the egg” of tariffs once they had been rolled out, it was a coin flip as to whether the Supreme Court allowed the tariffs to stand.

Traders agreed, with the price of the polymarket trading between 40 cents and 50 cents from early September to early November.

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What moved the odds

On game day, here are the key moments that moved the odds (watch video)

Pregame (51% 📉 38%)

The morning of the hearing, odds fluctuated between 51% and 38%, eventually settling at the lower end of that bound as the hearing got underway.

A post that morning on ScotusBlog hinted that even Trump’s appointees were not sure to back him and floated the striking down of tariffs without refunds as a plausible scenario.

Sauer Opens Strong (38% 📈 41%)

The administration’s odds increased slightly following U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer’s opening arguments where he made the case for the executive branch’s broad authority in foreign affairs and ability to regulate foreign commerce conferred by Congress and regularly upheld by the judicial branch.

Gorsuch Strikes Back (37% 📉 27%)

Justice Gorsuch, who, along with Justice Roberts, was considered undecided going into the day, speaks for the first time, questioning Sauer for a 7 minute period that dropped the odds almost 10%. In his questioning, Gorsuch dismantled much of the solicitor general’s stance and forced him to walk back or qualify several of his key arguments.

Katyal’s Rebuttal ( 27% 📉 18%)

Neal Katyal, a lawyer for Companies against Tariffs, tackled tough questions from pro-tariff justices Alito and Kavanaugh, refuting Sauer and the administration’s case that Congressional precedent from 1977 justified their actions.

One key moment came when Katyal highlighted the government’s bragging that they had raised trillions through tariffs. This contradicted their claim that the tariffs were regulatory as opposed to revenue-raising.

War Powers Limits (25% 📉20%)

In the minutes following Katyal’s exchange with Alito the odds again rose to 25%, explained by Alito forcing Katyal to concede that the president has the power to impose things like quotas and embargos through hypothetical scenarios.

However, odds fell again when Justice Sotomayor and Katyal established that in previous emergency situations including wars overseen by Nixon and Bush, the usage of tariffs as a regulatory weapon required ratification from Congress.

Alito: Regulation, not Revenue (22% 📈 28%)

In dialogue with Oregon Solicitor General Benjamin Gutman, Justice Alito established that in times of emergency, which the administration considers this to be, broader powers to regulate foreign affairs should not be treated with increased suspicions of just being another source of revenue.

Point of No Return

In retrospect the turning point is clear:

The moment that Justice Neil Gorsuch, a first term Trump appointee, signaled fundamental skepticism of the administration’s legal theory in his first rounds of questioning, Polymarket traders saw the writing on the wall.

The price of the contract never again reached the level where Gorsuch began his questioning, and tumbled lower following Katyal’s rebuttal of Sauer and the administration’s case.

Watching Polymarket alongside the hearings provides a second-by-second aggregation of legal reasoning that provided a signal that was live and direct instead of having to be parsed from retrospectives from news sources.

The understanding that these tariffs were not likely to stand (which was also concluded in our interview of Peter Harrell directly after these oral arguments, where Peter also correctly predicted which way every justice would vote) could have provided valuable information to a multitude of small and large businesses operating in the US on a multi-trillion dollar question.

Introducing Polyvideo

This analysis was conducted using a tool we developed called Polyvideo which allows users to view minute-by-minute odds of a polymarket side-by-side with a YouTube video.

The default settings on the front menu allow you to conduct the same analysis we did; feel free to use this for any future projects or contribute suggestions / features to the project in the comments or on X at @droovg.

Tariff refunds?

Disclaimer

Nothing in The Oracle is financial, investment, legal or any other type of professional advice. All odds are time sensitive and subject to change. Anything provided in any newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not meant to be an endorsement of any type of activity or any particular market or product. Terms of Service on polymarket.com prohibit US persons and persons from certain other jurisdictions from using Polymarket to trade, although data and information is viewable globally.

Captain K and The Oracle go way back.

Before the 2024 election, we interviewed an analyst who was calling for Democratic outperformance despite the Polymarket forecast showing an insanely close race.

After that, I went looking to speak with a “data guy” on the right, someone who the Trump die-hards were reading to help them sleep easy at night.

One reader pointed me to Substack author Captain Seth Keshel.

Keshel’s work had been cited by Trump in his efforts to challenge the 2020 results and is a regular on the conservative podcast circuit. His forecast was aggressively bullish on Trump at a time when the conventional wisdom was calling it a coin flip.

In our first interview in October of ‘24, he told me, more or less, that he would bet his entire family’s net worth on a blowout Trump win, saying there was “literally nothing positive in the data for Harris at all, except for some polls.”

In the end, he nailed it.

Keshel was the only elections analyst I’m aware of to call Trump’s sweep of every swing state.

Today, we’re back for Round 2 with Captain K for an early look at his midterm map.

This interview has been edited for length. All answers are his own.

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How is Trump doing with his base and with independents right now? Does the Epstein story move the needle for midterms?

The online discourse is disproportionate to reality on both. The base is divided, but when you look at voter registration data, the country is moving toward Republicans almost everywhere. Polling has never been great for Trump even when he’s popular. He’s at 45-46% approval sometimes, low 40s during the government shutdown, rarely over 50%.

But Ronald Reagan had a 63% approval rating in 1986 and Republicans still lost seats in the House. Any interpretation of how Trump is doing right now is going to be somewhat divorced from how midterms turn out.

On Epstein specifically, the messaging out of the administration set unrealistic expectations. But the midterms will be decided by six to eight percent of the electorate in a handful of states, and those people are thinking about rents and conditions around them, not about what’s happening on X.

A lot of Trump’s best accomplishments happened right off the bat. He shut the border down immediately, pardoned January 6 folks immediately. The things people are still waiting on are at the mercy of a very small Republican majority in Congress with Democrats locked in to block everything. That’s the real story.

What does Trump want to do that isn’t possible right now because of Congress?

The SAVE Act is one. It passed the House and would require proof of citizenship to register to vote, plus voter ID provisions. The Senate doesn’t have 60 votes, so Thune is looking at ways to get it across the finish line with just 50, but even that’s iffy given Murkowski, Collins, and McConnell.

Any Supreme Court Justice nomination would also come down to a huge dog fight in the Senate.

What does the historical data say about midterms?

Since 1934, the president’s party has lost House seats in 20 out of 23 midterms. That’s 87% of the time, with an average loss of 27 seats.

The Senate is somewhat better, with losses in 16 of 23 midterms. The overwhelming historical evidence is that midterms seriously go against the president.

But you said you’re seeing Republican gains in voter registration almost everywhere since the 2024 election. How do those two things square?

I get this question all the time. Voter registration trends are extremely predictive for presidential elections because you get fuller turnout and more partisan behavior. In a midterm, you don’t have Trump on the ticket to drive base turnout, and the Republican majority is too small to absorb an average historical loss.

The registration data will eventually pay off in presidential years, and it takes states like Florida and Texas completely off the board for Democrats this cycle. But it’s not going to save Republicans in the key competitive seats that decide the House majority.

Walk us through your House map. What are you watching?

I consider 396 of 435 House seats to be safely predicted. That leaves 39 seats that will decide the majority. The states with the most competitive races in that 39 are California, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Arizona, Iowa, and Texas.

Of the 396 safe seats, I have it 200 Republican and 196 Democrat. When I add the leaners, I get Democrats up 209 to 207 with 19 true toss-ups I don’t have predictions for yet. My overall expectation is that whoever wins the House holds between 220 and 229 seats, so not a big majority either way.

Polymarket has Democrats winning the House at 83%. Is that too low given the history?

The historical average loss is 27 seats, which would hand Democrats the House easily. But Republicans have 200 safe seats they essentially can’t lose. They could lose every toss-up and still hold 200. So I’m at about 75-25 Democrat for the House.

Is there anything that could happen between now and the election that could seriously move your forecast? Wildcards to watch?

Two things. The biggest factor helping Democrats would be the Virginia Supreme Court upholding the new Democrat-drawn map, which would swing roughly plus-4 Dems, minus-4 GOP. That would be devastating for Republicans.

The biggest factor helping Republicans would be the Supreme Court striking down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which would allow Southern states to redistrict and potentially pick up around 11 seats. But I also don’t know the appetite of some Republican-controlled states, like Georgia, to actually execute that redistricting. Indiana already dropped the ball on a similar opportunity.

People have been waiting on it. If it doesn’t happen in the next few weeks, it becomes a non-factor for 2026. But it will absolutely crush Democrats in 2028 for the House if it comes down then.

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Polymarket has “Blue Wave” (Dems win House plus 49 Senate seats) at around 70%. What’s your number?

I would put the odds of a Blue Wave, as you’ve defined it, at about 25%. I think Democrats are likely to win the House, so if you define Blue Wave as just that, bet heavily in favor. But I don’t think they get to 49 Senate seats.

That means knocking out Susan Collins, and they never get Susan Collins. I would put Blue Tsunami, which I’m guessing you define as 235-plus House seats and 51 Senate seats, at 5% or less.

Where are Republicans most vulnerable in the Senate?

North Carolina is the most vulnerable GOP seat. Tom Tillis has won twice but never by more than two points. The Democrats have Roy Cooper, a former two-term governor with major name recognition, almost certainly as their nominee. Republicans will likely run Michael Watley, who’s Trump-endorsed but not well-liked by the grassroots.

Maine is the second most vulnerable. Collins votes with Trump about 94% of the time but is 50-50 on the most important votes. She survives because she outperforms Trump by huge margins in Southern Maine, which is basically suburban Boston. Her opponent is likely either Janet Mills, the current governor, or Graham Platner, a Bernie-aligned progressive with some controversy around past comments. If it’s Platner, Collins wins easily. Mills is tougher, but I still lean Collins. People should look up Sarah Gideon in 2020, who had everything going for her and still got smoked.

What about the two vulnerable Democrat seats?

Michigan and Georgia. Michigan is an open seat, and notably Gretchen Whitmer is not running for it, which is basically an announcement that she’s running for president in 2028. I actually think Whitmer is the strongest Democrat on paper for 2028, and almost nobody’s pricing that in. The Republican Mike Rogers has a shot because the Democrat field is weak. I’d call Michigan 60-40 Democrat.

Georgia is John Ossoff defending a Trump-won state. He’s mostly harmless as a candidate, plays well with college-educated Atlanta voters, and benefits from the fact that the Trump base doesn’t turn out in big numbers in midterms, as we saw with Herschel Walker in 2022. I’d call Georgia 65-35 Democrat.

Where are you focused on the governor races?

The most important governor’s race in the country, from a conservative movement standpoint, is Arizona. Getting rid of Katie Hobbs is critical because there is election reform legislation ready to go, similar to what Florida did, that Hobbs won’t sign. Republican voter registration advantage in Arizona is almost exactly twice what it was in 2022 when Hobbs won her own election by 17,000 votes.

I think Andy Biggs wins the primary easily and then wins the general. He plays well with the soft moderate Republican voters in Maricopa County, who tend to be heavily Mormon and are usually the ones who wander off when the race tightens. I’d put Biggs as the nominee at 80-85% and favorite in the general.

Georgia has an open seat and it’s a mess. You’ve got Keisha Lance Bottoms likely for the Democrats and a bunch of establishment Republicans like Brad Raffensperger and Chris Carr who don’t excite the base. I give Republicans a 55-45 edge to hold that governorship.

Wisconsin I lean Democrat 60-40. Michigan I think actually has a Republican shot because there’s a left-wing independent candidate in the race who will split the Democrat vote. John James would be the GOP nominee and he’s a strong candidate, Apache pilot, young, sitting congressman. It’s competitive.

Minnesota is the wild card people keep asking me about because of Lindell. But now that Klobuchar is running, I don’t see a path. She wins by massive margins every time. If Lindell wants to win, he has to run as Jesse Ventura, all crime and populism, not as a conservative culture warrior. But there’s no guarantee he even gets the nomination since Minnesota has a party nominating convention, not a primary.

We have Alaska Senate at almost exactly 50-50. You think it should be 25% for Peltola?

Yes. Mary Peltola is a great candidate and she has the ranked choice dynamic working in her favor, same as in 2022. But Alaska strongly prefers federal Republicans. The current senator, Sullivan, got 54% of the vote in 2020, about the same margin Trump ran.

He’s an incumbent, Trump’s energy agenda is popular in Alaska, and there will be fear about a Democrat obstructing those policies. I’d put Peltola’s chances at about 25%.

Ohio Senate is at 57% Republican. Too low?

I’d say 85% Republican. Ohio is not a purple state anymore. It’s on the path Iowa took, becoming a solidly Republican state. Democrats are also going to be spending money playing defense on three House seats that got redrawn, which means less resources for the Senate race.

Any big foreign policy event that could change the midterm calculus?

I don’t think an Iran strike would help. The younger base of the Republican Party really doesn’t want Middle East involvement, even under good cause banners. There’s significant PTSD about that in the GOP base. Trump’s instincts are to avoid prolonged ground wars, that was one of his clearest campaign positions, but not everyone around him has the same mindset.

What’s the biggest midterm mispricing you see on Polymarket right now?

The Blue Tsunami market. Thirty-four percent is still too high. Give me under 5%. The Senate map alone makes it basically impossible. Democrats have to hold Georgia and Michigan and flip both North Carolina and Maine to even get to 49 seats, and they have to do all of that in a year when they’re likely to win the House by running up the score in safe seats rather than breaking through in red territory. It’s a bad map. The House will be close and the Dems will probably take it. The Senate is a coin flip at best.

Follow Seth Keshel on Substack and X. His book, The American War on Election Corruption, is available March 5.

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Disclaimer: Nothing in The Oracle is financial, investment, legal or any other type of professional advice. All odds are time sensitive and subject to change. Anything provided in any newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not meant to be an endorsement of any type of activity or any particular market or product. Terms of Service on polymarket.com prohibit US persons and persons from certain other jurisdictions from using Polymarket to trade, although data and information is viewable globally

Just over a year ago, we launched The Oracle by Polymarket on Substack.

The thesis was simple: data produced on our exchange has value for everyone on earth, especially for news readers who might never make a single trade.

The goal was to introduce the world to the colorful characters who trade on prediction markets, understand how the best forecasters think, and inject their ideas into the global news slipstream.

This is why it was obvious to partner with the world’s home of independent journalism, Substack.

So far, we’ve explored this from a number of angles:

• In our first issue on the Biden dropout, we saw how markets metabolized each new headline.

• In the Seychelles, we saw how Polymarket was able to correctly call an election in a country with no formal polling.

• In our interview series, we learn how top forecasters (human and machine) think about the world. From seeing through flawed polls, to quant modeling on Fed behavior.

• And we’ve done deep dives into Polymarket’s 94.1%+ accuracy track record, and busted myths about political bias in prediction markets.

Today, we’re announcing that:

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Polymarket is Massively Increasing our Support for Substack Creators

Starting today, you’ll see new tools for Substack authors to use Polymarket data in their reporting. Including:

• Embed any polymarket in Substack, without leaving the editor page

• Beautiful graphs show up automatically (no more pasting screenshots)

• See inside the portfolios of top Polymarket traders, full sports support, and more

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Live Today

These features are live and ready to use today.

Here is a taste of how top Substack authors are using them.

Slow Boring

Americans think everyone is corrupt

Donald Trump is running easily the most corrupt administration in decades. Whether selling off pardons for cash, delivering sweetheart deals on rare earth metals to donors, or earning hundreds of millions in deals wi…

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2 months ago · 403 likes · 640 comments · Matthew Yglesias

House Inhabit

"LOOK UP" Disclosure Is Upon Us

“Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man’s desire to understand…

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2 months ago · 143 likes · 137 comments · Jessica Reed Kraus

Sinocism

Xi's Beijing inspection; Li on rare earths; Hong Kong white paper; Taiwan Affairs Work Conference; PBoC report

Today’s top items…

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2 months ago · 55 likes · 3 comments · Bill Bishop

Cartoons Hate Her

Democrats Need a President Who Fucks

Note: This article is free, but most of my stuff is paid, and I publish five times a week. If you like what you see, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber…

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2 months ago · 214 likes · 287 comments · Cartoons Hate Her

Neil’s Substack

The Seahawks' Next (and Harder) Task: Avoid Being a One-Off

No sooner does the confetti settle on the Super Bowl field to conclude one season than we begin looking ahead to the next one. It’s the nature of s…

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2 months ago · 7 likes · Neil Paine

Let's Address This with Qasim Rashid

Another Shutdown Looms—and It Was Entirely Avoidable

The federal government is once again barreling toward a shutdown, this time with a February 14 deadline. And once again the crisis is being driven by a familiar and deadly combination: Republican extremism and Corporate Democratic fecklessness. Like a dystopian version of Groundhog Day—here we go again…

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2 months ago · 218 likes · 38 comments · Qasim Rashid, Esq.

Stay Tuned

Today’s announcement is just the beginning.

Substack is way more than a newsletter platform.

It’s the home of fearlessly independent news and analysis.

We’ll have more to say on that soon.

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Disclaimer

Nothing in The Oracle is financial, investment, legal or any other type of professional advice. All odds are time sensitive and subject to change. Anything provided in any newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not meant to be an endorsement of any type of activity or any particular market or product. Terms of Service on polymarket.com prohibit US persons and persons from certain other jurisdictions from using Polymarket to trade, although data and information is viewable globally.

European tech worker by day, Polymarket whale by night, Betwick [main wallet, follow on X] has amassed over $800k in lifetime profits since he started trading during Biden’s Hotswap Summer of 2024.

The Oracle spoke with him about his early wins in movie markets and Trump mentions, recovering from a 70% drawdown, and how he’s trading the Iran crisis.

This interview has been edited for length. All answers are his own.

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What can you reveal about your non-Polymarket life?

I work in tech in Europe, nothing related to trading. My university course was maths and finance based, and I’d been gambling since I was a kid with my dad on sports, horses, just 10 or 20 pounds for fun.

But when I signed up to Polymarket, you could see people on the leaderboards who’d made a million dollars in a year. I thought, “I read all the news anyway and maybe there’s a money-making opportunity here.”

Joining a couple Discords was another turning point. You get to talk to other people trading every day, and that really speeds up your learning.

Like a lot of the larger traders, you started during the Biden dropout. Why did that moment draw so many people in?

It was a very personal story. You get to know a US president over a number of years, even people in Europe. So it’s this personal story of “will he, won’t he?” It was in the news constantly. You see the interviews, you see the debate where he struggled. I think it’s just something you tend to have an opinion on. And it was such a long buildup of news stories, so that draws people in.

What were your first big wins?

My first taste was the mention markets, tracking Trump speeches. One of my first bigger wins was betting against him saying inflammatory things at a town hall.

Trump would say “Comrade Kamala” and “Sleepy Joe Biden” a lot at rallies. But town halls are much more question and answer, much less combative. After watching videos from his previous campaign, I bet against some of the things he’d said all the time in rallies that wouldn’t really fit that Q&A pattern.

I wasn’t doing statistical analysis. I was more indexing on the scenario he was going to be in rather than tracking how many times he said “border” in the last 10 speeches. My edge was looking at the actual setting versus all the different rallies.

You don’t do mentions much anymore. What changed?

My account has grown so quickly that mention markets just don’t have enough liquidity for me to spend time on now. That’s one tip I’d give to young traders: if you’ve got a lower bankroll, you can focus on lower liquidity markets that more experienced traders are leaving out because it’s not worth their time. You can find much bigger edges in those and focus on a niche.

You also did well on movies. What was your approach there?

I wouldn’t share too much on the movies because I still use that methodology. But it’s not vibes at all. I’m not a movie fan, I wouldn’t go see the film or watch trailers. I would see what the vibes were from early reviews on Twitter, then model that with some other stuff. It’s box office opening weekends. There’s interesting modeling you can do.

Midway through last year you had a big drawdown. What happened there?

The big loss was Romania, which has been covered by other people. Then I lost quite a bit on ‘Israel strikes Iran’ at the last minute, where it looked like they were going to negotiate for a few more days and Israel did the surprise attack.

I still think those two were good bets. But what happened after was I was kind of tilted, I guess, in the poker sense. I was probably not trading too well after losing quite a big chunk of the portfolio. I made a bad bet on the South Korean election, just trying to over-trade, trying to win back cash. I was trying to live trade the election results without having done all that much background research.

A few things helped me recover. Definitely take some time off. Take like a week, maybe even longer. Stop trading completely. Take a few days not thinking about it, not trying to think about the markets you’re in.

After a few days when the dust settles, go back and analyze the positions from a more cold-hearted way when the emotions are gone. Ask: was this good trading? Was this the right size? Would you make this trade again today?

Talk to me about position sizing. Do you use Kelly criterion?

I tend to stick to 1/3 Kelly-ish on my bigger positions. But I’ll only really be going that big on one position a month, maybe not even that. I think people with a full-time income that isn’t from trading should probably be sizing bigger. You’ve got alternative income, so you can afford to size a bit bigger. You’re also researching less markets, so if you’re really spending time on one, that’s another reason to go bigger.

That does add variance, so you need to make sure drawdowns aren’t going to affect you negatively long term. In the early days, I had 50% of my portfolio on Moana, but my portfolio was really small then. Even on the Iran markets in January, I had a third of my portfolio across correlated Iran positions.

People don’t think enough about correlation in their positions. You can easily over-size on correlated positions, especially for big US elections or Iran markets where there’s so many different markets that are correlated. For example, I had a bunch on US strike Iran, and if the US strikes Iran, obviously the odds of Khamenei being out also rise.

Ok let’s talk about Iran, where you have some of your biggest current positions, mostly betting on a cooling off. How do you think about what’s happening now?

For the last few weeks, my take has been Trump wouldn’t do a punitive strike as punishment. We’ve shifted into this pressure campaign of let’s get Iran to the table.

Last week there was an article every day about officials talking about strike plans. Every podcast was about imminent strikes. But to me it seemed like classic Trump ‘Art of the Deal,’ pressure the other side and get them to the table.

What I thought was interesting: why would all these US officials be leaking strike ideas if they were just going to do it on a Saturday? They’d probably be keeping quiet. You’re getting almost too much strike vibes from the press and US officials. It felt like a pressure campaign more than a real war plan.

On January 14th, you built a massive “no strike” position when all the OSINT pizza guys were going crazy. How did you see through that?

Trump had already given himself an off-ramp that same day, saying Iran should stop the executions. He changed the goalpost from “don’t shoot protesters” to “don’t execute prisoners,” which is much easier to fulfill. Then he repeated that and said Iran agreed to stop executions.

The odds went crazy for a strike that day based on jets heard in Iraq, bases being evacuated, no-fly zones. But I thought Trump was by far the most important piece of evidence. That was more about picking which sources to prioritize and not panicking.

If you follow OSINT pages or people tracking flights, all you’re seeing all day is a new tanker showing up in Qatar, three jets in Jordan. That feed will naturally incline you to think something’s about to happen. But I think it’s better to almost ignore all of that and focus on the macro.

You’re only really seeing what they want you to see with open-source stuff. Look at those people watching B-2 bombers going the wrong way before the Iran strike. I don’t think you’re really going to see a strike on those things. It’s better to make longer-term predictions on the macro stuff.

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How do you see the current Iran situation playing out? And what events would make you change your mind?

I think we’ll get one to two months of negotiations. There’s a decent chance of a deal that at least the US and Iran would be happy with. Israel will be harder to please, they’ll push on ballistic missiles.

Iran will give enough flexibility on the nuclear side that talks won’t fall apart straight away. But Iran holds firmer than you’d imagine in negotiations, so maybe Trump gets impatient. The most likely scenario is one to two months of negotiations, decent chance of a deal, but maybe more chance of it falling apart.

For things to change, I’d be looking for Trump growing increasingly impatient, setting new red lines or ultimatums, maybe ramping up pressure in other ways. Like in Venezuela, he was ramping up bombing of boats. Maybe he tries a blockade on Iranian oil ships.

With Israel I’m less confident predicting their moves. And then keeping an eye on how negotiations are going.

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Any final words of wisdom?

I try to think of things that are repeatable. If I can use information I learned one time again, that’s really valuable because it means I’m using time really well.

Like I researched Fed rates a lot for the last year, working out how Fed messaging works, how they’re guiding markets throughout a month, how the CME Fed Watch futures tell you what the market’s thinking. Once you’ve learned that for the first few months, you can use that information again and again for every Fed rate meeting.

Similar with movies. Movies are happening every week, so once you’ve got modeling built, that’s time-saving.

Make sure you’re confident in your thesis from a macro level so you’re not going to get swayed by small bits of noise. Make sure your sizing is correct. If you’re feeling uncomfortable with the sizing or it’s keeping you from sleeping, maybe size down. That might be for the best long term even if you don’t make as much on that bet, because it might prevent a bad cycle.

Get your sizing right, be confident in the bets and reasons you’re doing them, and the emotion sort of follows from that.

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Disclaimer

Nothing in The Oracle is financial, investment, legal or any other type of professional advice. All odds are time sensitive and subject to change. Anything provided in any newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not meant to be an endorsement of any type of activity or any particular market or product. Terms of Service on polymarket.com prohibit US persons and persons from certain other jurisdictions from using Polymarket to trade, although data and information is viewable globally.

A common critique of prediction markets is that traders fall into the “crypto bro” stereotype, ie male and right leaning.

This has called into question the veracity of Polymarket’s election markets, with some believing that partisan traders implies flawed forecasts.

But does the data reflect this bias? The short answer is no. In fact, Polymarket traders slightly overvalued Democrats in the most recent electoral cycle.

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Findings and Analysis

We analyzed 79 events from the November 2024 election, looking at only elections primarily contested between a Democrat and a Republican (more details + dataset + code snippets at end of article).

Polymarket traders were correct for 77 (97.5%) of them 7 days before closing, and 74 (93.7%) of them 1 day before closing. Among these 79 events, Republicans won 48 while Democrats won 31.

Looking at where the inaccuracies fall, we see that they actually display a tendency to be overconfident in Democrats.

The figures below, known as “confusion matrices” display predictions vs reality. Here is how to interpret the chart below:

1. Top left box: how many elections traders predicted would be won by the Republican AND were actually won by the Republican

2. Bottom right box: how many elections traders predicted would be won by the Democrat AND were actually won by the Democrat

3. Top right box: how many elections traders predicted would be won by the Democrat BUT were actually won by the Republican

4. Bottom left box: how many elections traders predicted would be won by the Republican BUT were actually won by the Democrat

   

At both the 7 day and 1 day time horizons, there are several markets where traders predicted a Democrat win, but in reality a Republican won (top right), while there are no cases where the opposite was true (bottom left)

Going one step further, we can also look at the raw probabilities to compare confidence in predictions by measuring a quantity called directional bias.

Imagine if, in 100 coin flips, you guess a coin flip to be heads 60% of the time, but heads only comes up 50% of the time; you have a clear bias toward heads - you kept thinking heads was more likely than it actually was. In this case, your directional bias would be 60% - 50% = 10%.

Our dataset showed a pro-Democrat directional bias of ~3.6% at a 7 day time horizon and ~6.3% at a 1 day time horizon.

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Takeaways and Caveats

So does this mean that traders on Polymarket are predominantly liberals with outsized belief in the Democratic party? NO.

1. Election markets are not perfect, in fact, accuracy slightly decreased approaching the election date. Late money is not always smart money. It’s quite possible that platforms like Polymarket may see an influx of momentum and/ or purely speculative traders as markets near resolution. While we didn’t examine the direct correlation between polls and Polymarket forecasts, it’s notable that ’s Silver Bulletin, also found a slight Democratic lean in polling in 2024.

2. Due to changes in Polymarket’s API, pre-2024 election data is incomplete. We were able to source a limited dataset from the November 15th, 2022 election, which showed a different pattern: 11 markets predicted correctly and 3 markets such that, at a 7 day time horizon, traders predicted Republican but the Democrat went on to win. The logical next step in this research is to assemble a full dataset of all D vs R election events on Polymarket to understand how traders’ partisan betting patterns are changing over time and compare with polls.

3. This experiment (and the difference between prediction markets and polls in general) also only assesses the trading sentiment of users; their political preferences may vary from how they choose to trade.

Our final takeaway is that, while the signal might not always be perfect, the trading patterns from the 2024 election, Polymarket’s highest volume US national election so far, does not support the “conservative crypto bro” stereotype.

As more diverse traders enter prediction markets, we’re eager to see how these dynamics evolve, and the 2026 midterms will be the next major test.

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Data Collection

We used Polymarket’s Gamma API and tag system to find all markets that fulfilled the following criteria:

• Already resolved

• American election primarily contested between a Democrat and a Republican or pertaining to the Democrat party and Republican Party (i.e. no Zohran vs Cuomo, no Seattle mayor, no primaries)

• Focus on the 2024 election for data availability (as opposed to 2022) and adherence to Democrat vs Republican (as opposed to 2025)

While this does constrict our analysis pool, it allows us to prioritize only markets that directly signal towards the validity of our question.

Our dataset + all code used to collect it are available here, and we encourage users to revisit this question after the midterms, when more data will be available.

See 2026 Midterm Forecasts

Disclaimer

Nothing in The Oracle is financial, investment, legal or any other type of professional advice. All odds are time sensitive and subject to change. Anything provided is for informational purposes only and is not meant to be an endorsement of any activity or market. Terms of Service on polymarket.com prohibit US persons and certain other jurisdictions from using Polymarket to trade, although data and information is viewable globally.

At 2pm this afternoon, Jay Powell will step on stage, say “good afternoon“ and explain his decision to leave the Fed Funds rate unchanged.

Polymarket puts odds for “No Change” at 99.6%, steadily increasing in certainty since late November.

The Fed under Powell is famous for its policy of “forward guidance,” a fancy way of saying they don’t like to surprise markets about their rate decisions. At the same time, they can’t just come out and tell us the decision early. That would be too obvious.

Instead, the Fed has a widely acknowledged policy to telegraph its moves through informal channels, most notably leaks to the Wall Street Journal’s Nick Timiraos.

But how early do these decisions actually crystallize?

Polymarket traders love hunting for “bonds” or high-probability bets that rarely flip. Fed rate markets are a bond-lover’s paradise, since everyone involved hates surprises. Then the interesting question becomes: when exactly is the point of no return? What is the earliest point you can pile into the consensus trade with the best risk-reward?

Tldr:

Across 22 Fed decisions from March 2023 to December 2025, I find that Polymarket odds crystallize with a median of ~26 days before the Fed meeting, which is early enough to create tradable entry points.

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Methodology

I analyzed using data downloaded from Polymarket directly. The objective is to quantify when odds crystallize, defined as the point at which the leading outcome becomes dominant (≥80%) and stops flipping materially (daily changes ≤5% for ≥3 consecutive days).

The 80% threshold marks the point where consensus forms. Below this level, probability remains spread across multiple outcomes. For example, let’s assume 60% at “No Change”, 25% for “ 25bps Cut”, 15% for “25bps Hike”. Above 80%, alternatives shrink below 20% in total, making reversals unlikely barring regime-level shocks.

Key Findings

Across the Fed decisions measured, Polymarket odds consistently crystallized:

• Mean crystallization days: 25.8 days before decision

• Median: 26 days before decision

• Range: 3 to 48 days (excluding outliers)

These markets crystallize far earlier than you expect ~86% of the time (19/22 times), where consensus forms weeks before the meeting.

Diagram 1 shows the number of days required for odds to fulfill the crystallization criteria. The main outliers are (a) March to May 2023 (Silicon Valley Bank crisis) (b) September 2024 (first Fed rate cut after raising interest rates), both of which occurred during regime shifts. They are characterized by deep uncertainty about the Fed’s decision itself.

Also, the three meetings (highlighted in green) crystallized late (3-7 days out) due to major and surprising data releases within 10 days of the decision. For example, the hot CPI in Dec 2024, PCE in Jan 2024 and a macro surprise in Sept 2025 that broke earlier consensus. Traders should check the economic calendar close to the meeting for events that can delay or disrupt crystallization.

In normal cycles, the question is straightforward: Will the Fed hold rates or cut by 25bps? The framework is clear, so odds settle early. During regime shifts like a banking crisis or the first rate cut in years, the question itself changes. Should the Fed prioritize financial stability over inflation? Will they cut aggressively or ease gradually? Each new data release can completely reverse market expectations, preventing odds from stabilizing. Prospectively, traders can identify regime shifts by reading more on Fed communications signaling framework uncertainty or monitoring elevated VIX for a continuous period.

A regime filter essentially separates:

• Information discovery: Stable expectations result in early, reliable crystallization.

• Policy uncertainty: Framework challenges lead to persistent volatility up to decision day.

Volatility compression

The pattern is clear, volatility compresses sharply as the meeting approaches.

• Large daily swings (from 3% to 5%) persist more than 40 days out.

• Volatility declines steadily into the final 10 days.

• Close to decision day (0.5% to 1%), probabilities barely move.

The majority of information discovery and profit opportunities occur before the Fed blackout period (~10 to 13 days before announcement). By the time the blackout period begins, the volatility collapses as consensus has been priced in, leaving limited upside for new positions.

Diagram 3 shows the baseline with mean crystallization timing of 25.8 days and stabilization detected across 73% of meetings. With that being measured, the 80% confidence and 5% volatility thresholds are considered robust. Varying these parameters by ±5 percentage points shifts crystallization timing by at most 5 days, while more extreme settings either detect noise too early (prone to macro-driven reversals) or miss consensus formation.

The 80% level effectively identifies the point where a dominant outcome emerges and reversal risk sharply declines, while the ±5% volatility filter reliably separates sustained consensus from temporary fluctuations.

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What Causes Odds to Shift?

Polymarket odds respond to the same forces that move the institutional rates markets. The primary catalysts include:

• Macro data releases: CPI, NFP and PCE prints that shift Fed’s inflation/employment dual mandate.

• Fed communications: FOMC minutes, speeches by Chair Powell and voting members and Beige Book release.

• Market-moving events: Financial stress (e.g., global financial crisis), extreme shocks (e.g; Covid 2020).

Once the blackout period begins, new information flow slows sharply. As shown earlier, odds movements during this phase are driven more by positioning than fundamentals, reinforcing why crystallization typically occurs ~26 days before the decision.

Polymarket vs CME FedWatch: Why compare them?

To ground the analysis in institutional expectations, I compared Polymarket probabilities against CME FedWatch, a proxy of Fed Funds futures.

The comparison serves two purposes:

• Credibility: to validate if prediction markets align with institutional pricing.

• Signal discovery: to identify when one market adjusts faster than the other.

The idea is not to declare a “better” market per se, but to understand who leads, who follows and when divergences matter.

Per diagram 5 and 6, across four recent Fed meetings (Jul to Dec 2025), CME FedWatch led Polymarket 63.4% of the time, with Polymarket adjusting on average 1.44 days later. Early-cycle gaps are largest 40-60 days before a decision but these differences compress sharply as the meeting approaches. By the final few weeks, probability gaps typically narrow massively, indicating convergence toward a shared consensus. This pattern suggests that institutional pricing often pulls retail odds, rather than the other way around.

This lead-lag relationship matters because it reveals that Polymarket is reacting rather than discovering. The ~1.44 day lag likely reflects an information and liquidity gap. Potentially, institutional traders in Fed Funds futures have direct access to comprehensive sell-side research, proprietary macro models and deeper liquidity, allowing immediate position adjustments.

When odds move in CME FedWatch first:

• it signals new information is being priced by the Rates markets.

• Polymarket odds follow with a short delay, creating a temporary mispricing window. The mispricing windows are the largest 40+ days out before the decision.

For traders, this means divergences are not a noise, but often transitional states before convergence. It is worth noting that traders should view this on a relative-value basis rather than solely believing one is correct while the other is wrong as odds could flip quickly with new emerging data.

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Execution Considerations

Relative-value positioning within Polymarket

Before crystallization (40+ days out): When probability remains dispersed across multiple outcomes (e.g., 63% “No Change”, 31% “Cut 25 bps”), traders can allocate exposure across the two leading scenarios at a combined cost below $1. As odds compress toward the crystallization point, one outcome typically dominates, allowing profitable exit before full crystallization.

After crystallization (26 days out): Once odds stabilize at ≥80%, the directional trade becomes clear but the edge diminishes. The relative-value approach works best in the early, high-uncertainty phase.

Liquidity

An interesting discovery is that polymarkets for upcoming Fed decisions can support position sizes of several hundred thousands dollars without causing a significant price impact. Larger trades, however, can quickly consume the available liquidity and move prices, limiting scalability.

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Conclusions

Polymarket Fed odds crystallize in 86% of meetings analyzed (19/22), typically 26 days before decisions.

The trading framework:

• (1) enter when the leading outcome hits ≥80% with <5% daily volatility for 3+ days,

• (2) monitor CME FedWatch for early signals as it leads Polymarket by ~1.4 days

• (3) before crystallization, buy both leading outcomes if they sum to <$1 and

• (4) avoid regime shifts flagged by VIX >40 (during Covid-19 crisis, global financial crisis).

One wild card in this strategy is that Powell’s tenure ends May 2026. A new Fed chair could abandon forward guidance entirely, turning the succession decision itself into the ultimate regime shift test for this framework.

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• X

• Substack

• Github for this article

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Disclaimer

Nothing in The Oracle is financial, investment, legal or any other type of professional advice. All odds and forecasts are time sensitive and subject to change. Anything provided in any newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not meant to be an endorsement of any type of activity or any particular market or product. Terms of Service on polymarket.com prohibit US persons and persons from certain other jurisdictions from using Polymarket to trade, although data and information is viewable globally.

@semi (aka @slight-) is a Polymarket whale who ran a $286 deposit up to over $1 million in Polymarket profits.

When we last spoke, he explained his maxim of “reversing stupidity,” fading stale conventional wisdom and overhyped headlines.

Earlier this month I noticed his wallet was a top holder of “Yes” for Government shutdown by Jan 31, which at the time was trading around 22%.

When I asked, his thesis was simple:

At the time very few prominent Dems were calling for a shutdown, but with thousands of aggressive ICE agents fanning out across the country, Semi thought the chance for some kind of catalyst was well above 22%.

Three weeks later, ICE agents killed a second protester in Minneapolis, sending odds of a shutdown to 80% within hours.

The Oracle caught up with Semi on Monday to discuss how he thinks the coming shutdown will play out, why he thinks Democrats are underpriced to win the Senate, and California’s “insane” billionaire tax.

This interview has been edited for length. All answers are his own.

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You were heavy on “shutdown” before the second ICE killing, of Alex Pretti, happened. Walk me through your thinking.

When you first reached out to me, I thought this is basically a one or two sentence thesis. ICE is so controversial among Dems, and they’re going to have to vote to specifically authorize it. Trump is being so aggressive in so many different areas right now. There are so many ways that Dems could just explode and not want to fund ICE.

It almost seemed like a 50/50 shot that everything would go swimmingly up until the last day where they have to authorize this appropriation. When you have thousands of police officers who are just hired, who aren’t amazingly well trained, and there’s mass protests against them, this type of thing is just sort of what happens at some point.

I was still accumulating when ”shutdown” was at 8 or 9%. I wasn’t sure it would be Minnesota. Trump had floated sending a bunch of ICE agents to Maine. Maybe something would happen there. But the fact that ICE is so controversial among Dems, and they’re policing so many different places at once, means the odds of something really weird happening are pretty high.

Polymarket has shutdown odds at about 80%. Do you think there’s any offramp at this point?

I’d say 90% is fair value today. The only way I could realistically see DHS funding getting passed is a huge Trump back down on immigration. Even then, you have to bring the House back. They’re not in town and there’s a huge snowstorm.

The Democrats’ concrete demands are: ICE needs to stop wearing face masks, a full independent investigation, civil liberties protections, never detain US citizens. This is a multi-week negotiation. It just doesn’t seem like something that happens in one week.

You lost money on the last shutdown betting it would be shorter. What happened?

Once we got into it, I realized both sides are actually completely fine with the shutdown. It’s not affecting them negatively. The Dems’ base wants to oppose Trump as hard as possible, and this is the one time their base is aligned with their strategic vision. It’s the only time they’ll have leverage until September.

Eventually Dems will start thinking about the coming midterms and cave, like last time. But it will take multiple weeks.

Let’s talk about the midterms. Polymarket has Democrats around 75-80% to win the House, about 33% for the Senate. How do you see it?

The House is probably over 90% for Dems. The Senate is probably a true toss up.

There’s a lot of races where Dems have strong candidates. Alaska, for example, the markets have as a toss up. But Mary Peltola is probably the strongest candidate Dems have anywhere. She very nearly won Alaska. There was polling today from Morning Consult that had Dan Sullivan as one of the least popular senators in the country, at minus nine. That actually surprised me.

Ohio seems quite underpriced for Dems. It’s at 63% Republican when it should be a toss up. Sherrod Brown lost by 3.5 points in 2024 in a year Trump won the popular vote. If you assume a blue wave environment, Democrat plus seven or eight, and take some points off because John Husted is stronger than Bernie Moreno, you should still think this race is a toss up.

Do Democrats think they can win the Senate at this point?

I think most Dems think they’re underdogs, but this will probably shift. Trump is losing his edge on his main issue. In the Siena poll, he no longer has an advantage on immigration. That’s very bad for Republicans. If they can’t run on immigration and they can’t run on the economy and they can’t run on health care, and there’s a huge voter turnout differential where Dems are incensed by Trump, this is quite good for their Senate chances.

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What about the Maine Senate primary? Does that tell us anything about where the Democrats are headed?

I have money on Janet Mills. Mamdani won, which is obviously very impressive. But he was magnetic in a way that very few candidates are. It’s less a sign that the Dem Tea Party is going to win every race and more that Mamdani is a really amazing politician.

Graham Plattner has Nazi tattoos. He’s opposed by very big money on the Dem side. And Janet Mills is the incumbent governor who’s won the state multiple times. I don’t understand why Plattner would be the favorite.

I also have a thesis that if you’re a very old candidate, it hurts you in some ways, but old people tend to be more sympathetic to you. Maine is actually one of the oldest states in the country. I think this hurts Mills a lot less than it would almost any other state.

I see you’re looking at the California billionaire tax. What’s your thesis there?

I have no idea why this is at 50%. This is insane. I bet it down to around 40%.

First, it’s not even obvious this will be on the ballot. It has several hurdles. For it to even get on the ballot is maybe 50 to 60%. And I strongly believe that once it gets on the ballot, the voters will defeat it.

A lot of people think California equals Dem, and Dems hate rich people, so they’re going to vote for it. If you look at how ballot props historically go, this is just not true. There was a ballot prop in Massachusetts in 2022 raising taxes on millionaires by 4%. It won by only 2% in Massachusetts, dramatically underperforming any Dem at any level.

This wealth tax is much more radical. Income taxes everyone understands. Wealth taxes are a very new thing that’s never been done, and voters have a huge status quo bias. On ballot props, there’s a systematic polling error where the Yes option is usually overestimated by double digits. We have one poll showing Yes up 10 points. If I were running this prop, I would want to see Yes up by 20 before the giant money comes in against it.

You’re expecting massive spending against it by the tech companies?

Spending is more important on ballot props than most elections. Most people don’t have preconceived notions about a ballot prop when they walk into the ballot box. When you can spend $100 million to educate people, you can pretty easily defeat a prop in most cases.

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Any other markets you’re watching?

I’m not fading a US intervention in Iran. It seems very plausible. But what I am fading is all of the regime change markets. If Trump strikes Iran, that doesn’t make me think regime change.

We already have an example of Israel having a shot at killing the Supreme Leader last year, and Trump vetoed it. And is there anyone who thinks Trump has the patience for a seven-month campaign like Libya? He was arguably elected for opposing a war in a Middle East country that started with the letters I-R-A.

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Disclaimer

Nothing in The Oracle is financial, investment, legal or any other type of professional advice. All odds and forecasts are time sensitive and subject to change. Anything provided in any newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not meant to be an endorsement of any type of activity or any particular market or product. Terms of Service on polymarket.com prohibit US persons and persons from certain other jurisdictions from using Polymarket to trade, although data and information is viewable globally.

Welcome back to another guest post from Stand, a prediction market pro trading terminal with automatic trades, live trade feeds, alerts, and more.

The beauty of transparent prediction markets is not only the forecasts they produce, but also the historical data that lets us see who the real experts are. The more AI dominates the news cycle, the more the AI markets heat up.

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Today, we’re on the hunt for traders who are most in tune with the decade’s biggest tech and business story.

From model releases, to benchmarks, to AGI paperclip factories, here are three Polymarket traders to watch on all things AI:

1. @send-tips-plz (aka fffffz)

Accuracy Rate: 58.8%
Active AI Positions: 9

The first account to bookmark on all things AI is send-tips-plz.

Note: this trader recently rebranded to ‘ffffz’. As we discussed in “Copy-Trade Wars,” this is increasingly common misdirection by good traders to throw you off the scent. Lesson here: always get the wallet address (Stand does this for you automatically).

Tips correctly called the “Best AI model” polymarkets in 6 out of 12 months in 2025. Impressive!

His worst loss was betting on xAI in August (note: that month wrecked a lot of AI traders as you’ll see with yyds233 below). But Tips adjusted quickly, closing out that position for a 50% loss instead of letting it bleed out.

Tips has open positions in:

• “No” on ‘Will Google Gemini 3 score at least 40% on the FrontierMath Benchmark by Jan 30th?’

• “Yes” on ‘Will Google Gemini 3 score at least 45% on Humanity’s Last Exam by January 31?’

• “Yes” on ‘Will xAI have the best AI model at the end of January 2026?’

• “Yes” on ‘Will Google be the first company to have an AI model hit 1500 on Chatbot Arena by June 30 2026?’

• “Yes” on ‘Will OpenAI acquire Pinterest in 2026?’

2. @3tourists

Accuracy Rate: 85.7%
Active AI Positions: 1

When in Rome do what the Romans do. Polymarket user @tourists is always on vacation except when it comes to the AI markets. He made his bones by correctly calling OpenAI would release GPT-5 before August 10th, and then proceeded to nail the OpenAI browser release date. The coup de grâce is that he correctly predicted Gemini 3.0 would be released before the end of November. The point being, tourists knows when new AIs are getting released.

Currently, he has a ‘Yes’ position on “Will GPT Ads be live by March 31st.” The track record speaks for itself. And that big drop you see in the P&L chart? Not AI related whatsoever. Tourists wandered out of his domain by placing a rather large wager on when the US government shutdown would end. Tourists lost nearly $150k on that adventure.

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3. @yyds233

Accuracy Rate: 91.7%
Active AI Positions: 4

Yyds233 is #1 in GPT-5 markets, #2 in Open AI markets, #12 in Tech markets, and #9 in Sam Altman markets (yes, that’s a real category). More impressive is the fact that yyds233 has a 80% or better win rate in all of these categories. His overall profile win rate is 87.1%. His top four wins by P&L are all OpenAI related.

Yyds233 had one misstep when he thought OpenAI would retain their place as the best AI model in August. He netted his worst loss of $13K. The good news is he’s only lost four other markets, two of them non-AI related.

His current AI positions:

• “No” on ‘Will Google Gemini 3 score at least 60% on the FrontierMath Benchmark by Jan 30th?’

• “No” on ‘Will Google Gemini 3 score at least 50% on the FrontierMath Benchmark by Jan 30th?’

• “No” on ‘Will OpenAI launch a new consumer hardware product by March 31, 2026?’

• “No” on ‘Will xAI have a #1 AI model by June 30?’

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In Closing

If any of these traders caught your eye, you can follow their moves on Stand.trade for free. And our list is constantly evolving.

Any other sharp AI traders you are keeping tabs on? Let us know on X or on Discord.

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Disclaimer: Nothing in The Oracle is financial, investment, legal or any other type of professional advice. Odds are time sensitive and subject to change. Anything provided in any newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not meant to be an endorsement of any type of activity or any particular market or product. Terms of Service on polymarket.com prohibit US persons and persons from certain other jurisdictions from using Polymarket to trade, although data and information is viewable globally.

Toby Shevlane is CEO and co-founder of Mantic, a London-based startup working on applying AI to forecasting.

Mantic’s automated system has just placed fourth (out of roughly 500 entrants) in the 2025 Metaculus Fall Cup. This puts it well into the top 1% of human forecasters, and by far the best performing AI forecasting system that we are aware of.

The Oracle spoke to Shevlane about why most AI forecasters fail to extract value from news, and three places where Mantic thinks Polymarket traders are off base.

This interview has been edited for length. All answers are his own.

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Mantic dominated the Metaculus Fall Cup. What separates you from other AI forecasting systems?

We have an edge on scaffolding and data. Separately we’re also currently working on reinforcement learning to improve the models.

On data, we take very seriously the idea that to make a good prediction, you have to be well informed. We have someone on staff whose whole job is adding more data sources. We have tens of different sources: Wikipedia, news, country-level economic data, population and migration data, company-level financial data, earnings calls.

We don’t use Google Search or Perplexity. That’s actually a disadvantage, and we sometimes miss things because of it. But we need to be able to backtest, to run experiments where we ask questions from the perspective of six months ago and see how we would have done. You can’t do that with Google Search because you can’t see what it would have told you six months ago.

In finance they call this “point in time data.” You need data sources you can roll back without any revision. Google and Perplexity don’t have that property.

What do you mean by “scaffolding?” Can you break down how Mantic approaches a new forecasting question?

Mantic doesn’t work as a single call to a language model. We make many, many different calls during the workflow. You can imagine a factory line with lots of different workers doing different jobs: breaking down the question, doing research, pursuing different lines of inquiry, then bringing it all together into a clean, well-informed prediction.

Take the Greenland acquisition market. The classic base rates approach would be to look at how often the US has acquired Greenland before. That’s never happened. So you might use Laplace’s Rule, which is a fancy way of saying, “It’s been a long time and this has never happened, so it probably won’t happen soon.”

But we go further. We look into the history of US-Greenland relations, hunt for analogous cases where one country acquired another, and try to learn lessons. I like to start specific, then zoom out. If you just use “the US acquiring any territory” as your reference class, you’d get an overestimate.

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You mentioned other AI systems add news but it doesn’t help them. What are they doing wrong?

Sometimes people say, “I accidentally didn’t include news in my pipeline, but my score didn’t go down.” That is crazy, because news is often key information. The fact it’s not helping is a really bad sign.

In the early days, we found similar results. But that’s completely not true now. You need to figure out how to best process the information. It’s not obvious how to use a news article to make a better prediction.

There’s this whole political theme of “the news media is biased, so don’t trust it.” I think that’s a different trap from freaking out about headlines constantly. You shouldn’t fall into either. Just because news has bias doesn’t mean there’s no information to be found.

One insight is that it helps to just hoover up as much information as possible. Humans want to be efficient with their time, so they only look at trusted sources. But AI doesn’t have that limitation. It can read a lot of stuff and extract anything useful.

What about the “wisdom of crowds” approach of ensembling different models?

There’s a paper called “The Wisdom of the Silicon Crowd” that uses tens of different language models and takes an average. I’m slightly skeptical that’s the best approach. Most models aren’t very good at forecasting, so you’re bringing down the average.

We try to work out the perfect recipe. Is it the same model with different prompts? Different models together? What’s the right number? Part of the lesson is that using frontier models is definitely a good idea.

Are there question types where Mantic performs better or worse?

We probably aren’t very good at sports. We haven’t invested in that because it’s not our commercial focus.

The Pope selection is a classic hard problem. All the politics happens behind the scenes. Mantic isn’t magic. If there’s no information coming out of the Vatican, we can’t somehow know who’s in the ascendancy.

But one thing we’re quite good at is not giving too confident an answer when we don’t know. In the Dutch election recently, we picked up a lot of points not because we predicted the winner confidently, but because we were better calibrated than the human community. We didn’t take an overconfident position.

Can you give an example where that caution paid off?

The Japanese leadership election at the end of last year. Polymarket and the options markets had a lot of weight on one particular candidate. But Takaichi won, and she hadn’t been the front-runner.

When I looked back at what Mantic would have said, it was giving her much more weight than the markets were. Just seeing everyone else run off a cliff and knowing to step back and be more cautious can be very helpful.

We pick up points for being confidently right on some questions, but we also pick up a decent amount for being cautious where caution is needed.

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Have you used Mantic to trade on Polymarket or other prediction markets?

We haven’t set a bot loose on Polymarket. It would be fun. But to Polymarket’s credit, the reason AIs don’t do really well is that the markets already do a really good job of finding accurate probabilities. It’s a very hard benchmark.

The highest-value use case for us right now is working with traders on traditional financial markets, helping them predict events that are upstream of price changes. Like the Japanese leadership election: different leaders might have different fiscal policy, which affects bond yields. If you can have an edge predicting these key events, it helps a lot. But it’s mediated through the skill of human traders rather than plugged directly in.

Mantic’s Forecasts

The following are some of Mantic’s forecasts, along with its reasoning. The “US strikes Iran“ forecasts are current as of January 21; the others as of January 13.

US strikes Iran by…

Jan 23rd: <1%

Jan 31st: 5%

Feb 28th: 39%

March 31st: 52%

July 1st: 63%

The high probability is driven by the ongoing crisis in Iran, where a violent state crackdown on nationwide protests has led the US to threaten military intervention on humanitarian grounds. The US is actively moving military assets, including an aircraft carrier strike group and strategic bombers, into the region after briefly pausing an attack in mid-January 2026.

The direct US airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in June 2025 (”Operation Midnight Hammer”) established a recent precedent for large-scale kinetic action, lowering the threshold for a future strike. Key restraining factors are pressure from regional allies, including Israel and Gulf states, to delay or avoid military action due to fears of a wider conflict and significant Iranian retaliation.

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Jerome Powell federally charged by June 30, 2026

🔮 Mantic: 26% | Polymarket: 12%

The Department of Justice is actively investigating Powell, having served the Federal Reserve with grand jury subpoenas on January 9, 2026, concerning his June 2025 congressional testimony.

An indictment could provide the “for cause” justification required by the Federal Reserve Act to remove Powell before his term as Chair expires in May 2026. Charging a sitting Federal Reserve Chair is unprecedented and faces major obstacles, including bipartisan political opposition and the high legal bar for proving perjury. Recent administration-led prosecutions of other political figures have faced significant legal challenges, suggesting a difficult path for any indictment.

The US acquires part of Greenland before 2027

🔮 Mantic: 8% | Polymarket: 25%

Risk is elevated by a recent, aggressive US push. The Trump administration appointed a special envoy in December 2025 and has publicly threatened force.

But a successful acquisition faces strong, unified opposition. The Greenlandic and Danish governments have repeatedly stated Greenland is not for sale, and a 2025 poll shows 85% of Greenlanders oppose joining the US. Key European NATO allies have issued joint statements supporting Danish sovereignty. Any unilateral action would risk significant diplomatic damage.

The most plausible path is a treaty creating a “Guantanamo-style” enclave with exclusive US jurisdiction. This is constrained by the current lack of Danish and Greenlandic consent.

Khamenei out as Supreme Leader of Iran by January 31, 2026

🔮 Mantic: 17% | Polymarket: 20%

Risk is driven by intense, nationwide protests that began in late December 2025 following a major currency collapse. The IRGC has been placed on its highest alert level.

Khamenei’s advanced age of 86 creates a persistent underlying risk of death or incapacitation. Media reports citing intelligence sources indicate the existence of a “Plan B” for him to flee Iran.

The regime’s survival currently depends on security force loyalty. As of now, there are no confirmed reports of significant defections from the IRGC or regular military. A plausible pathway to removal in this short timeframe involves a sudden health event or a “soft coup” by security elites.

The Supreme Court rules in favor of Trump’s tariffs

🔮 Mantic: 26% | Polymarket: 27%

During November 2025 oral arguments, justices across the ideological spectrum expressed skepticism that IEEPA provides explicit authority for the executive to unilaterally impose tariffs, a power the Constitution reserves for Congress.

The case involves an estimated $150 billion in collected duties, likely triggering the Major Questions Doctrine, which requires clear congressional approval for executive actions with vast economic and political significance. The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has already ruled the tariffs unlawful.

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Disclaimer

Nothing in The Oracle is financial, investment, legal or any other type of professional advice. All odds and forecasts are time sensitive and subject to change. Anything provided in any newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not meant to be an endorsement of any type of activity or any particular market or product. Terms of Service on polymarket.com prohibit US persons and persons from certain other jurisdictions from using Polymarket to trade, although data and information is viewable globally.

Scottilicious is a political science PhD dropout and Polymarket whale with over $1.3 million in lifetime profits.

In our last piece, he explained his strategy for hiring Korean informants on Fiverr to understand the country’s politics.

Now he’s going even further with an on-the-ground research trip to Portugal that he hopes will be funded by over $300k in bets he’s placing on Sunday’s presidential election.

The Oracle caught up with him for a debrief on his research trip and election trades.

This interview has been edited for length. All answers are his own.

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You flew to Portugal to research the election. That’s a first for you. What prompted it?

Midlife crisis. Need for change.

I went to Portugal about two years ago and really liked it. The people were super friendly, and they have a really high percentage of English speakers. And I figured if I needed to hire a translator, wages are low enough that it wouldn’t break the bank.

When I posted on X that I was considering this, I got responses immediately from Portuguese people offering to help. One was a political science major who ended up being an incredible source for background. You really need this architecture for interpreting results you get from interviews. Otherwise you’re just showing up and interviewing random people.

I know zero about Portugal’s elections and politics. Give us the lay of the land.

Portugal had a right-wing dictatorship from the 1930s to mid-1970s. So the older folks are really averse to anyone with authoritarian tendencies.

The current election is for president, which is more of a ceremonial role than prime minister. They act as a referee, a crisis manager, versus a policymaker. It’s only the second time in 20 years this race is going to a second round, which has piqued everyone’s interest.

The main candidates are:

• Seguro: Center-left socialist

• Cotrim: Young liberal reformer who’s strong on social media. Like the Andrew Yang of Portugal.

• Mendes: Old school center-right

• Ventura: Far-right populist, sort of a mix of Trump with Marine Le Pen

So you just walk into cafes and start asking people who they’re voting for?

We wanted to produce a video on the trip so I had my cousin come with me to do video editing. We had a few formal interviews that were set up by the folks I connected with on X.

But on the second or third day, we were stressing about not having enough material. Michael, my cousin, was like, “Go have some coffee. I’m just going to start interviewing people.” A majority of what we captured is him going up to random people asking if they’ll talk on camera for a few minutes.

We also interviewed Uber drivers. We asked three who they were voting for, and two were pro-Ventura. That’s because a lot of immigrants are driving Uber in Lisbon and lowering prices, so the established drivers are pissed.

Interview Footage

Ok let’s go to your positions. You have almost $200k on “No” for Ventura winning. That’s your biggest position. Why so confident?

The consensus that Ventura can’t win a second round is overwhelming. Even his own supporters agree. We had maybe two exceptions out of everyone we interviewed.

Portugal is where France was 10 years ago with Marine Le Pen. She was gaining popularity, but a huge segment of the population would block her in the second round. It’s a similar dynamic here. They’re not at the point yet, like Italy or Hungary, where they could actually put a far-right person in power.

There’s also a hidden factor I gleaned from personal research that’s hard to discern from polls: many Ventura supporters want him to be Prime Minister, which is a more powerful position. So they may not vote for him for president. His own people might sit this one out.

But Ventura is heavily favored to go to the second round. And you have almost $200k on “No” for President. Doesn’t that make you nervous?

I’d put it at 50 to 55% that he makes the second round. The market seems high based on my conversations. He was leading at one point, polling at 23-24%, but now he’s below Cotrim.

One really bright guy on the PolyAlpha discord showed that my assertion from on-the-ground research about negatives against Ventura is borne out in polling too. He has really high negatives.

What’s your game plan if Ventura does make the second round?

If there’s meat on the bone, I’d bet more “No” on him. If he makes it and the “No” only goes to 85 or 90%, that’s a solid buy. But if it goes straight to 99, what’s the point? I’m near my limit already.

My risk manager is on my ass about too much Ventura exposure.

Mendes was a heavy favorite but seemed to crash in early January. What happened there?

He had a very poor debate performance and some corruption accusations came out. He was directly attacked in the debate and just bumbled. Didn’t really know what to say.

But what I found on the ground is that the weakness was already there. Three-quarters of the Mendes supporters we talked to were equivocal. One guy said, “Yeah, I was for Mendes, but I’m looking at other possibilities.” You didn’t see that with the Seguro people. You didn’t see that with the Cotrim people. You certainly didn’t see it with the Ventura people.

That’s alpha. That enthusiasm gap isn’t something polls necessarily capture. I built a decent “No” position on Mendes because of it. Started buying in the 60s, and now it’s in the 80s.

Some older folks even made fun of his height. “Oh, Mendes, you know, shorty.” That doesn’t indicate conviction. That indicates the guy’s not being taken seriously.

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Who has the real momentum?

Cotrim. The market has him at 25% to make the second round. I’d put him at 45 to 50%.

I actually met him at a rally. The level of access was incredible.

He’s got influencers and actors at his rallies. He’s the Andrew Yang of Portugal. Less radical than Milei, more policy-focused than shock value. When he was head of Portugal’s tourism industry, he put a billboard of Portugal’s best wave in Times Square to attract New Yorkers. That entrepreneurial mindset appeals to young people who are tired of the bureaucracy and cost of living.

Any other positions we should know about?

I have $50k “No” on Melo, an independent guy who had initial appeal as anti-establishment but didn’t grasp the issues in debates. The “No” at 90% all the way to 93% is a solid buy. I’m buying more today.

I also have about $6k “Yes” on Seguro, but I’m not sizing up because the momentum isn’t with him. If I had both the quantitative data and the momentum pointing to Seguro, I would’ve sized a lot more. But I’m not going to do it when someone else has the energy.

How did having local sources change your information advantage?

Speed. Cotrim was accused of sexual harassment yesterday. I got that info within 10 minutes from one of my guys. Before it hit the international press.

One source told me, with 70% confidence, there’s a Catholic poll about to come out showing Ventura in the lead. That’s the kind of intelligence you get from being plugged in locally.

I noticed you also have $200k on “No” for Trump’s Greenland acquisition. Does that connect to Portugal at all?

Actually, yes. It’s portfolio construction. Knowing myself, sometimes I’ll prevent going too heavy into something by buying up something else. I may have bought so much Greenland so I could make sure I didn’t go too crazy on Portugal.

My risk manager is already giving me grief about the Ventura position. The Greenland bet is a hedge against my own worst instincts.

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Final advice for traders considering boots-on-the-ground research?

Come join me. Let’s do this.

Seriously, if someone said, “Here’s your budget, go to northern Portugal and interview people,” I’d do it in a heartbeat. The Portuguese are the most welcoming people. They just want to talk and tell you about their country.

The hard part is knowing when to stop. My risk manager exists for a reason.

Follow Scottilicious on X @scottonPoly.

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