How it works
TransferMarkets is a prediction market played with TM Tokens. No money changes hands — the site hands out the tokens, and what is at stake is whether you were right.
A price is a probability
Every market asks a yes-or-no question. A YES share pays one token if the answer turns out to be yes, and nothing if it does not; a NO share is the other way round. So the price of a share is what the market thinks the chances are: 57% means a YES share costs 0.57 tokens and a NO share 0.43 — the two always add up to one token. Every trade moves the price: buying YES makes YES dearer, buying NO makes it cheaper again. Your own trade moves it too, so a stake buys slightly fewer shares than stake ÷ price.
What you win
If your side is the result, every share you hold pays one token; the other side pays nothing. A stake of 50 tokens at 57% buys about 87 shares — a little under 50 ÷ 0.57, because the price rises as the order fills — so it returns about 87 tokens if you were right, and nothing if you were not.
When is a share worth buying?
The price is the crowd's forecast, so buying is a claim that the crowd is wrong. If you think the real chance of yes is 70% and YES costs 0.57, YES is cheap; if you think it is 40%, NO at 0.43 is the bargain. Being right on a single market takes some luck, but over many markets you come out ahead only if your forecasts beat the price more often than not. That is also what makes a market a good forecaster: a mispriced market is an opportunity for whoever spots it, and their trade moves the price closer to the truth. Nor does 57% mean it will happen — of all markets priced at 57%, roughly 57 in 100 should end in yes and the rest in no.
Changing your mind
While trading is open you can sell a position — the whole of it — back to the market. A sale is the buy run backwards: your shares go back into the pool and the price walks down as they do, so you get a little less than shares × the price on screen. For a small position the difference is a few hundredths of a token; for a large one it is noticeable, which is why the sell dialog quotes the exact proceeds before you confirm. Mind what that means for profit: right after you buy, the price on screen is above what you paid, because your buy pushed it there. Selling straight back returns your stake, less a fraction of a token in rounding, and nothing more. A profit needs the market to move past the price you paid, by more than your own sale moves it back.
Who you are trading with
Nobody in person. Each market is a pool of YES and NO shares that TransferMarkets seeds when it opens the market, and every trade is a swap with that pool: buying YES puts tokens in and takes YES shares out, and the price follows from how many shares of each side are left. That is why there is always someone to trade with, even on a quiet market, and why a big trade moves the price more than a small one — a market seeded with more liquidity moves less. There is no fee and no spread. The only cost of a round trip is rounding, which always goes to the house, in millionths of a token.
How a market is decided
Trading stops at the market's closing time, usually before the real event. Once the event has happened, an editor posts the result. It stays open to correction for a challenge window, and payouts run when that window ends: every winning share pays one token, every losing one is worth nothing. After that the market is settled and nothing about it changes again. Positions you still hold when trading closes simply wait for the result.
If a market is cancelled
Sometimes a question cannot be answered — an event is called off, or the wording turns out to be ambiguous. A cancelled market refunds every open position at what it cost, so nobody wins or loses on it. Positions sold earlier are unaffected: that sale stands.
What the leaderboard counts
Realised profit, all time: what your closed positions returned minus what they cost. A sale counts the moment it goes through, a settlement when the payout runs, and a refund counts as zero. Open positions count for nothing until then, however good they look — a market can still turn, and so can the price you would sell at.
The house rules
- Smallest stake
- 1 TTK
- Largest single trade
- 10 % of the market
- Most you can hold in one market
- 25 % of the market
- Price tolerance
- 1 %
Limits keep one player from moving a market on their own. Your trade is priced the moment you send it, and it is refused rather than filled if the price moved further than your tolerance.