Markets

Match results, totals and in-play markets. Before kick-off, prices drift on team news and money; once the game starts, they reprice within seconds of every scoring play and change of state.

In play, the value is in how quickly and how faithfully the official record of the game reaches us, and in knowing exactly what the contract settles on: regulation time or extra time, the first report or the corrected one.

Contracts on professional matches in titles such as League of Legends, Counter-Strike and Dota 2. Here the game itself produces the data: every kill, objective and swing in the economy is recorded by the game's servers as it happens.

That makes the official data feed the reference everything else trails, broadcasts included, and the state of the game something a model can read directly rather than infer.

Short-dated contracts on where a price will stand at a fixed time, and markets on assets that trade on chain. The underlying trades around the clock on many venues at once, and each contract names the reference price it settles on.

The work is in reading the underlying where it moves first and in knowing how the reference is built, since a single print and an average over a window behave very differently near the close.

Contracts on daily maximum temperature and precipitation, settled on the readings of named weather stations. The forecast that matters is for one station, not a city, and the figure that settles is the one the official source publishes, when it publishes it.

Weather markets move slowly next to sports, and reward a better forecast more than a faster one.