How the signals are made

Where the numbers come from

Polymarket runs a rolling series of “Up or Down” markets for each coin: will the price at the end of a 5-minute, 15-minute, 1-hour, 4-hour or 1-day window be higher than at its start? Each market has an “Up” share that trades between $0 and $1. Its price is the crowd’s implied probability that the window closes up.

PolySignals reads the live order book for every current window (and the next one, when it already exists) about once a minute, and turns each price into a reading.

From price to reading

• Up probability is the midpoint between the best bid and best ask for the Up share. If the spread is wider than 0.10, the last traded price is used instead. If there is neither, the reading is empty.
• Score rescales the probability to a range of −100 to +100: (prob_up − 0.5) × 200. A 50/50 market scores 0; 80% up scores +60.
• Direction buckets the score: strong up at +60 and above, up from +20 to +59, neutral between, down from −20 to −59, strong down at −60 and below.
• Confidence says how much to trust the price. High needs a spread of at most 0.02 and at least $5,000 traded in the window. Medium needs a spread of at most 0.05. Everything else is low. Short windows rarely reach the volume needed for high confidence.

The late-window caveat

When less than 20% of a window remains, the reading is marked late and shown faded. By then the market mostly reflects the move that has already happened inside the window, not what comes next: a 15-minute market at minute 13 prices whether the last two minutes will undo a move, not whether the coin is trending. Late readings are excluded from the overall score.

Overall score per coin

The overall score is the confidence-weighted average of the current-window scores across all timeframes. High-confidence readings count fully, medium ones by half, low ones not at all; late and empty readings are skipped. If nothing qualifies, there is no overall score.

Staleness

If a quote cannot be refreshed, the previous value is kept and marked stale (shown with a ~). If the whole feed is older than 3 update intervals, the page shows a “data delayed” badge.

What this is not

A prediction-market price is a snapshot of what traders are willing to pay, in thin markets, over very short horizons. It is not a forecast, and PolySignals adds no model on top of it. Nothing on this site is financial advice. PolySignals is not affiliated with Polymarket.