How to read a market page, every number and what it means.

A market page packs price, probability, volume, and rules into one screen. Learn what each field is telling you before you commit a cent.

One contract, laid out field by field.

Almost every prediction platform shows the same handful of fields, even when the layout and the labels differ. The diagram below is a stylised market page, not a screenshot of any one platform, drawn to show where each field tends to sit and what it is telling you. Read it top to bottom, then read the real page the same way.

Six fields that decide what you are buying.

A price between a penny and ninety nine cents is a probability.

The single most useful habit when you open a market page is to stop reading the price as a price and start reading it as a probability. A contract that pays one dollar if the event happens and nothing if it does not will trade somewhere between a penny and ninety nine cents, and that number is the market saying how likely it currently judges the event to be. A yes price of sixty two cents reads as roughly a sixty two percent implied chance, before fees, per how prices are described across regulated venues such as Kalshi, whose contracts trade between one cent and ninety nine cents with the cents reading as the implied probability (per Kalshi's Help Center, as of June 2026). The scale below is the conversion in one line.

Three things keep that reading honest. First, the price is before fees, so the real cost of taking the position is a little worse than the headline. Second, the price is live and changes as people trade, so the number you see is a snapshot, not a settled fact. Third, on a single contract the yes and no prices normally add to about one dollar, and the small amount they sit above a dollar is the spread, which is the gap between the best price to buy and the best price to sell. Reading both prices, rather than one, is how you see that cost at a glance.

The price is the smallest part of the story.

It is tempting to glance at a market page, read the headline price, and treat it as the whole picture. The price is genuinely useful, because it tells you the probability the market is currently pricing. But on its own it hides almost everything that determines whether a trade is a good idea for you, from the precise question being settled to the real cost of getting in and out.

The resolution rules are where careful readers spend the most time. Two markets can look like they ask the same thing and settle on completely different criteria. The named source, the cutoff time, the treatment of edge cases such as a postponed event or a tie, and the exact threshold all live in that text. If you buy without reading it, you are trusting your assumption rather than the rule the contract will actually pay on.

Liquidity is the next thing the page reveals, if you know where to look. The order book or quote, the volume, and the open interest together tell you how easily you can trade and at what cost. A market can show an attractive price that exists only for a tiny order. The moment you try to trade real size, the price you get can be noticeably worse, and the same thinness can make it hard to sell later without giving up value.

Time is the field people most often forget. The close date sets how long the market trades, and the settlement date sets when you actually find out and get paid. Money tied up in a contract that settles weeks from now is money you cannot use elsewhere, and a position can swing in value many times before it resolves. Reading both dates keeps that commitment in plain view.

Fees quietly change the maths. A price that looks like a fair reflection of the odds can become a poor deal once a per contract charge or a settlement fee is added on both entry and exit. The page, or the terms it links to, sets out how each platform charges. Adding that cost into your estimate before you trade is the difference between a considered decision and a hopeful one.

Put together, a market page is a small dashboard. The skill is not reading any single number but reading them in relation to one another, so the price, the rules, the liquidity, the timing, and the cost form one coherent view of what you would be taking on.

Read the page the same way every time.

A simple routine makes a market page much harder to misread. Start with the resolution question and its source, in full, so you know exactly what settles the contract. Then read the price as a probability, and check the spread between yes and no as a first sign of cost. Next look at the book or quote and the size available, to judge whether that price is real for the amount you have in mind. Finally note the close and settlement dates and the fee terms, so the timing and the cost are part of the decision rather than a surprise.

It also helps to imagine the exit before the entry. Ask how you would sell this position if you changed your mind, and whether the same thin book that lets you in cheaply would let you out fairly. A position is only worth what someone will pay for it, not the last printed price. Reading the page with the exit in mind keeps that reality in front of you and stops a single headline number from standing in for a full picture.

Different platforms, the same six things.

The wording changes from one venue to the next, but the underlying fields rarely do. The table below maps how three widely used platforms present the same information, so that once you can read one market page you can read them all. We compiled it by reading each platform's own published help pages and documentation on 28 June 2026, rather than from hands on trading, and we note where a platform works differently under the surface.

Table 1. How three platforms present the same market page fields. Sources: Kalshi Help Center order book and pricing pages; Polymarket resolution and trading documentation; Robinhood event contracts overview. Compiled by Prediction Market Index from published documentation, as of 28 June 2026. Labels and layouts change, so verify the current page before you trade. Robinhood offers event contracts through Robinhood Derivatives via partnered exchanges including KalshiEX, ForecastEx, and Rothera, per Robinhood's event contracts overview, as of June 2026.

Read the resolution rules before anything else.

The price draws the eye, but the resolution rules decide what your contract actually pays on. Every market sets out, in advance, the exact question, the source that will determine the outcome, the date the market becomes eligible to settle, and how awkward cases such as a postponed event or a tie are treated. On Polymarket these rules sit directly under the order book and are set before the market opens, with outcomes confirmed through the UMA optimistic oracle, where a proposed result can be disputed and, if it is, decided by a token holder vote (per Polymarket's resolution documentation, as of June 2026). On a regulated exchange such as Kalshi the exchange itself confirms the result against the named source it published in the rules (per Kalshi's Help Center, as of June 2026).

This matters because two markets can ask what sounds like the same question and settle on different criteria. A market on whether a figure does something by a date may hinge on a precise definition, a cutoff time in a stated time zone, or a single official source that disagrees with the headlines. If you buy without reading the rules in full, you are trusting your own paraphrase rather than the text the platform will pay on. When the wording is ambiguous, or when the outcome depends on a source that could itself be contested, the honest reading is that the resolution is uncertain, and a careful reader treats that uncertainty as part of the risk rather than assuming it away.

Regulation shapes this layer too. In the United States, event contracts offered on registered exchanges fall under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Commodity Exchange Act, and the rules around how these contracts may be listed and monitored have been actively contested and revised through 2026, so the framework around a given market can change while the contract is still live. Where a platform operates outside that framework, the protections and the dispute process differ, which is another reason the resolution text and the named source deserve a careful read rather than a glance.

The gap between buy and sell is a real cost.

When a page shows a yes price and a no price, or a best bid and a best ask, the distance between them is the spread. You buy at the higher number and sell at the lower one, so the spread is a cost you pay just to be in and out of the market, separate from any platform fee. The strip below shows it for a single contract. The wider that band, the more the price has to move in your favour before a round trip simply breaks even.

Two more details turn that picture into a real cost. The first is size. A price is only true for the quantity offered at it, so if only forty contracts sit at the best ask and you want two hundred, the rest of your order fills at worse prices and your average cost climbs above the headline. The second is the exit. A thin market that lets you in cheaply can be slow and costly to leave, because the same shortage of resting orders works against you when you try to sell. Reading the book with both the size and the exit in mind is what stops a tempting headline price from standing in for the trade you would actually get.

What we read, and what we did not.

To write this guide we read the published help pages, pricing notes, and resolution documentation of Kalshi, Polymarket, and Robinhood on 28 June 2026, and we cross checked the way each describes prices, the order book, volume, and settlement. The diagrams on this page are our own stylised drawings of a market page rather than screenshots of any one platform, and the numbers in them are illustrative. Where a fact came from a platform, we have named that platform and dated the reading inline, so you can confirm it for yourself. We have not implied hands on trading we did not do, and where a platform works differently under the surface, such as Polymarket settling through the UMA oracle rather than an exchange desk, we have said so plainly. Layouts and labels change often, so treat every figure here as a way of reading a page, not as the current state of any single market.