u/EmbarrassedStudent10

If you buy NO on Kharg Island at 98 cents, the market will hand you 2.04% when it settles on August 31. That's roughly 13% annualized.

The market is asking whether Kharg Island stops being Iranian by the end of August.

Kharg is a coral speck 20 miles off the coast that handles roughly 90% of Iran's crude exports. Betting on NO means betting nothing happens.

This is one of the most important islands in the world, and with the Iran-US-Israel conflict quieter now, it's unlikely that anything of that caliber will happen in the next 60 days.

Originally posted on Predictbook: https://x.com/Predictbook/status/2073861323251658809

The only ways this market resolves as a YES are a resignation, a coup, or a funeral.

Do you really think that's even remotely possible? We don't.

Putin has run the country for over two decades, cleared the constitutional runway to stay until 2036, and shows no sign of stepping aside or falling over.

So we buy NO at 90 cents on the dollar, and while we wait for the obvious to become official, the market will pay us 3.25% on our position for the privilege of holding it.

Originally posted by Predictbook: https://x.com/Predictbook/status/2073855059746578839

Magdalena Andersson becoming Sweden's next prime minister trades at 74 cents on Polymarket. If she takes office, the contract pays a dollar. That is a 35% return by roughly mid-October, and since the S&P 500 delivers about 10% in a good year, you would be compressing three and a half years of index performance into one Scandinavian autumn. The question is whether the 74 is fair.

The companion market on whether her Social Democrats win the most seats trades at 96 cents.

So, the market believes her party wins almost certainly while she personally becomes prime minister only three times in four? Yeah, sure.

Originally posted by Predictbook: https://x.com/Predictbook/status/2073486013259800751

Fortunately, you don't need to know anything about the country or the candidates.

There is a trick in election markets that does most of the work. The wider the gap between the top two candidates, the more likely the favorite wins, and the more likely he's still underpriced.

Still, here's all the information you need.

The election is set for July 19, with a possible second round on August 9, and the man at 84 cents is Carlos Vila Nova, the sitting president. He won this office once already. He took 58% of the vote in the 2021 runoff, defeating Guilherme Posser da Costa of the MLSTP/PSD.

Incumbency in a two-round system is a compounding advantage, because even if the field fragments the first round, the runoff collapses into a referendum on a known quantity against a challenger most voters met last month.

His main opposition problem solved itself. The real threat to Vila Nova was never the four names below him on this market. It was his own party turning on him, because in January 2025 he dismissed Prime Minister Patrice Trovoada, citing prolonged absences and the government's failure to solve multiple issues, and Trovoada called the dismissal illegal and unconstitutional. That should have been dangerous.

Instead, the ADI descended into a leadership crisis, split between Trovoada's faction and a faction led by current Prime Minister Américo Ramos, backed by Vila Nova himself. The president fired his rival, installed his own man as head of government, and watched the only machine capable of unseating him saw itself in half.

Trovoada is not on this ballot. The 16-cent challenger, Nito Abreu, has been bleeding for a week on the chart, down 28% while Vila Nova climbed 37.

Another important thing you should know is that the role of president is largely ceremonial, with power in the hands of the prime minister. Ceremonial offices produce low-heat elections. Nobody's livelihood turns on the outcome, turnout runs on habit, and habit favors the name voters already know.

So the trade is 84 cents returning 100 in roughly two to five weeks, depending on whether he clears 50% outright or needs the August runoff. Call it 19% in five weeks at the slow end.

The strange part is that the demand clearly exists. Every earnings season, millions of retail traders bet on these exact events through weekly options, paying theta, crossing wide spreads, needing the stock to travel a specific distance in a specific direction just to break even.

Polymarket compressed all of that into one clean binary, beat or miss, which is much better by design.

Although these markets do have liquidity rewards, they are minuscule to attract traders.

The JNJ market, for example, offers 2 tokens for quoting within 6 cents of the midpoint at a 50-share minimum. No professional market maker is warming up a quoting engine for that, which means the order books stay empty, which means the first trader to show up faces a spread that eats any edge he might have, which means he leaves, and the market stays at $800 volume forever.

We think concentrating reward budgets on the 20 names that matter each quarter (NVDA, TSLA, AAPL, META), rather than sprinkling dust across 500 tickers, is a much better choice.

Another option is changing the markets themselves. "Beat quarterly earnings" resolves yes roughly 90% of the time for large caps because companies manage estimates down before every print, which is why half this page reads 93%, 98%, 95%.

If you had something like beat by 5% or more, guidance raised or cut, stock up or down 5% the next session, it would have attracted much more users.

And since sponsorship is permissionless, let the fintech media and finfluencer crowd sponsor rewards at a big discount and take attribution for it. "Liquidity provided by X".

Eurasia Group's forecast puts Burnham taking office around July 18-19, well before Parliament returns from summer recess in September.

This is simply a free 3.52% sitting right there.

Originally posted by Predictbook: https://x.com/Predictbook/status/2072745033908834617

The Fed is unlikely to raise rates or even lower them, which you can easily see on Polymarket. "No change" is priced at 90%.

That's because the Fed under new Chair Kevin Warsh has consistently signaled a "wait and see" stance, and inflation is still running above target while the labor market holds up, leaving no urgent case for either a cut or a hike.

At its most recent meeting, we perfectly predicted a 31.68% trade opportunity as Warsh held rates steady at 3.50%-3.75% and explicitly cited "elevated uncertainty," with the Committee stating it wants more time to navigate the balance between growth, labor strength, and inflation risk from supply shocks.

Since then, May's PCE inflation data came in at a three-year high, but economists noted it didn't show clear evidence that underlying price pressure is re-accelerating. It mainly reflected a temporary fuel price spike due to the Iran-US war.

Hence, the odds of a hike have cooled from 40.6% in mid-June to 10% today. The possible timeline is around September-October, when odds are already sitting around 80%. Warsh has talked tough on getting inflation back to 2%, but the Fed's own dot plot points to "one hike before year-end." So, it doesn't mean July specifically as you understand.

Cuts are basically off the table too. A cut needs either a sharp inflation drop or real labor market weakness, and neither has shown up. Job gains are keeping pace with the workforce, and unemployment has "changed little". Cutting now would look premature and contradict the Fed's own stated priority of restoring price stability.

Originally posted on Predictbook: https://x.com/Predictbook/status/2072747991958495479

The Islamic Republic has had exactly three supreme leaders in 47 years, and the only one who lost the job involuntarily needed a joint American-Israeli air campaign, bunker-buster munitions, and the assassination of half the command structure to be removed.

On 28 February 2026, Israel and the United States launched air strikes against Iran, aiming to induce regime change, and Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in the strikes. The bar for this market resolving NO is the death or the collapse of the state itself.

So the question becomes: how likely do you think it is that the USA or Israel kill or depose a man in the next six months when the last attempt at exactly this taught Mojtaba's entire security apparatus everything it needed to know? The security team very likely audited its own failures and patched every hole it found.

According to US intelligence officials quoted by CBS News, Mojtaba Khamenei is currently staying at a heavily protected undisclosed site somewhere inside Iran, and he is using a secret courier network to communicate with senior officials.

Bin Laden survived a decade against the full weight of American signals intelligence with couriers, and he was a fugitive without a state. Mojtaba has an entire intelligence ministry enforcing discipline around him.

Officials claimed many senior Iranian figures now avoid direct conversations unless necessary due to fears of surveillance and targeted strikes.

He has also removed himself as a physical object almost entirely. He does not travel to signings, does not address crowds, does not appear on balconies. When the ceasefire needed his blessing in April, a written statement in the name of Mojtaba Khamenei was read on state-run television.

When the Islamabad Memorandum needed his endorsement in June, again he issued a written statement, saying that he endorsed the memorandum of understanding despite misgivings.

Even Netanyahu, whose intelligence services have penetrated Iran more deeply than anyone, could offer only this: "I think he is alive. It's difficult to determine his condition accurately, you know? He lives in exceptional circumstances, hidden in a fortified bunker or a secret location out of sight."

The second risk, the US-Iran war, is now off the table, too. On June 17, 2026, Trump and Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian signed remotely the Islamabad Memorandum to end the war, a deal that provides for an end to military strikes, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping toll-free for 60 days, an end to the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports, and a 60-day extension of the ceasefire.

And the third and final risk, the internal-coup argument, is also off the table. The IRGC is the only force in Iran capable of removing him, and the IRGC was the institution that installed Mojtaba Khamenei.

According to Iran International, the IRGC pressured Assembly of Experts members to vote for Mojtaba Khamenei as Supreme Leader with "repeated contacts and psychological and political pressure". He is not a rival to the Guard. Why would the Guard overthrow the figurehead that launders their power into religious legitimacy? Even the "IRGC really runs things" thesis, which the White House itself believes, argues for YES. A weak leader whose weakness suits the strong men around him is the safest kind of leader there is. Nobody shoots the mascot.

So, logically, betting on YES Mojtaba Khamenei at 83c is low-risk. $10,000 would bring in $2,048.19, which is almost 40% annualized.

Thank you for coming to our TED Talk.

Originally posted by Predictbook: https://x.com/predictbook/status/2073446128893268249

Our bet is Golden State, and at 42% it's cheap. Here's why.

A few days ago, Draymond Green, one of Golden State's stars, turned down $27.6 million on his contract. He had a one-year option worth that much, and instead of taking it, he chose to re-sign a fresh deal, longer but smaller in year one, around $20 million a year.

Why would anyone do that? Because a team can only spend so much before it hits a hard ceiling, and Green's big number was hogging the space. By taking less now, he opened up just enough room for the team to afford LeBron.

And this wasn't a stranger doing a favor. Green and LeBron are real friends, Olympic teammates, and they share the same agent, Rich Paul, who also happens to represent Anthony Davis. So a big chunk of this class is being arranged inside one friend group.

Everything else points the same way. LeBron has always wanted to play next to a great shooter, and there's nobody better than Curry.

The coach, Steve Kerr, already knows him well from coaching him at the Olympics.

It keeps him on the West Coast, close to his family.

And Golden State is the only team openly, aggressively chasing him. When you line up the friendships, the agent, the fit, and the location, it's just not a coincidence.

LeBron made about $52.6 million last season. He's getting nowhere near that now, because almost every contender is tight against the cap. Golden State can realistically only offer him around $15 million a year, maybe less, because they already spent money re-signing a center named Kristaps Porzingis, which eats into what's left.

So their pitch is basically: take a two-thirds pay cut to chase one more title with Curry. That works if LeBron cares about rings over dollars, and he's a billionaire, so the money isn't really the point anymore. Per various sources, he is focused on happiness right now.

Originally posted by Predictbook: https://x.com/Predictbook/status/2072384506997186999

On a typical week, Kalshi's notional volume grows about 5%. But over the last 13 weeks, Kalshi compounded at 10.7% PER WEEK, and last week it was +14.1%.

Originally posted by Predictbook: https://x.com/Predictbook/status/2071699640815096237