Trading mechanics

How a round is defined, when you can trade, and how “the line” moves without an order book. For the pricing formula, see Pricing (LMSR).

What YES and NO mean

When the round settles, the app compares two numbers: the start price (frozen when the market begins) and a resolved price built from many USD snapshots taken after betting locks.

YES wins if the resolved price is strictly higher than the start price.
NO wins if the resolved price is the same or lower than the start (including tiny dips that round flat on screen).

Example 1 · YES wins

Start price: $1.0000

Resolved average: $1.0001 (any amount above the start counts)

Outcome: YES. If you held YES shares, those shares pay out; NO shares pay nothing.

Example 2 · NO wins

Start and resolved average both: $1.0000

Outcome: NO — a tie is not a win for YES.

Timeline: open, lock, resolve

While the market is open, you can buy shares on YES or NO. After lock, new bets are closed so nobody can react to the last seconds of the chart.

The resolved price is not one lucky tick: it is an average of eligible USD prices sampled between lock and resolve. That smooths out single glitches, but it also means your intuition should be about where price tends during that window, not only the final pixel.

Shares and prices (plain language)

You are not matched against one other person. The market behaves like a liquidity pool: when more people buy YES, YES becomes more expensive and NO becomes relatively cheaper, and the other way around.

The amount you type in is a budget. The system quotes how many shares that budget buys at the current curve. You might be charged slightly less than the budget if rounding hits the exact edge of a fill — the important part is the shares and the actual amount charged shown in your confirmation.

Example 3 · Moving the line

Imagine YES is heavily favored. Your dollars still buy YES shares, but each share costs more implied probability than when the crowd was split 50/50.

If you wait and the crowd shifts toward NO, the same budget might buy more YES shares later — or fewer, if YES rallies again. The quote always reflects the live pool, not a fixed sportsbook line.