How we read the market
Every Timeline B story is built on one real number: the market-implied probability of an improbable outcome. Here is exactly what that number is, where it comes from, and what is real versus invented.
Where does the probability come from?
Every Timeline B story is built on one real number: the market-implied probability of an improbable outcome, taken from a public prediction market. Every story page names the venue it was read on, beside the odds and the volume. The market question, that probability and its resolution date are real. The “Source · Polymarket” link on each story goes to that exact market; on a story where we do not hold the market’s permalink, the page says so rather than linking somewhere else.
Which venues do you read?
Two, and both trade real money. Polymarket is an offshore crypto-collateralised exchange; Kalshi is a US exchange regulated by the CFTC. A third, Manifold, is a play-money site we have built the ability to read but do not currently publish from. Whichever venue a story came from is printed on the story, because a probability only means something once you know who was pricing it and what they stood to lose.
What is a play-money probability, and what is it not?
On a play-money venue such as Manifold, traders bet a site currency that cannot be redeemed for money. The number they produce is real — it is genuinely what that crowd believes — and it can be sharp, because forecasting skill is not the same thing as a bankroll. What it is not is a price. Nobody is out of pocket for being wrong, so it carries none of the discipline that makes a real-money market’s number worth quoting, and it is easy for one determined participant to move. If we ever publish a story off a play-money market, the page says so in plain words on the story itself, not in a footnote, and the volume figure is absent because there are no dollars to report.
What does the percentage mean?
It is the market’s own implied probability for that outcome at the moment we captured it — the market price, expressed as 0 to 100%. A market pricing an outcome at 0.5% is putting it at roughly a 1-in-200 shot. Prices move constantly; ours is a snapshot, not a live quote.
When was the market observed?
Stories published from 21 July 2026 onwards carry the UTC timestamp of the moment we read the market. Earlier stories show the issue date only, because the pipeline did not record the time yet. The market keeps trading afterwards, so the live price on the venue will usually differ from the figure printed on the story.
What does the volume figure mean?
Where a story shows a volume, it is the amount of real money matched on that market at the moment we read it — a rough gauge of how much money and attention the question has drawn. It is not a measure of our confidence in anything. It is also not comparable between venues, which is why the story names the one it came from: on Polymarket it is the cash that crossed, while on Kalshi it is the face value of the contracts matched, each fully collateralised at a dollar. Both are honest dollar counts of different things. A story with no volume shown is one where we did not record the figure.
Which markets qualify?
A market qualifies when its outcome is priced between 0.5% and 5%, it resolves within 60 days, and it has real money behind it. On Polymarket that means at least $500,000 matched by default, with lower floors for thinner categories — $250,000 for sports, $75,000 for tech, and $50,000 for pop culture and science. On Kalshi, whose markets are smaller and whose volume counts a different thing, the floor is $10,000 of contract face value matched. The floors differ because the numbers do; using one venue’s threshold on the other would either admit everything or nothing. From everything that qualifies we take a small, deliberately varied set each day, and skip questions we have already covered — on either venue.
How is a story written and checked?
Each dispatch is drafted by a large language model from the market snapshot, then checked twice. Deterministic rules confirm the exact closing odds tagline, the satire disclosure on the tweet, the persistent lower-third on the Shorts script and the tweet length. Then a model from a different family reviews the draft adversarially for editorial safety — above all that no real person is quoted or depicted. Anything in politics or on a sensitive subject is held back for a human to approve before it can publish.
What part of a story is invented?
Everything else. The headline, the reporting, the quotes, the experts, the bylines, the images and the video — the whole dispatch from the universe where the long shot landed — is invented, AI-generated satire. Only the market snapshot is real.
Markets come from Polymarket and Kalshi. See About for who runs this, the newsroom for every fictional byline and institution, and Terms of Use for the full framing.
SATIRE · AI-GENERATED FICTION. No real person said or did any of this.