Politics desk
We added a politics desk. The bot still trades nothing but 5-minute crypto rounds.
There is a new Politics entry in the top menu. Behind it sits a desk of live Polymarket politics markets, one page per market, each showing the current price next to the thing that actually decides the result — the seat arithmetic, the committee vote, the market’s own resolution rules, who has said what, and where the money is going.
The important part first, because it is the question everyone asks: this is analysis, not trading. 5MTBot does not place orders in politics markets. There is no setting that turns it on, the engine has no code path to those markets, and nothing on a board will ever buy anything for you. The desk is a reading room. Every order the bot places is still an UP or DOWN share in a 5-minute crypto round, exactly as before.
A 5-minute round and an election are not the same animal
A crypto round resolves every five minutes against a price feed. That gives 288 resolutions a day, instant feedback, and enough repetition that a rule can be measured, tuned and thrown away if it fails. The whole strategy rests on that repetition.
A political market resolves once. It may take weeks or months, and when it lands it lands on a real-world event and a resolution process, not a number on an exchange. You get one observation. There is no sample to learn from, no way to backtest a rule against something that happens a single time, and no honest way to automate it.
The strategy underneath the bot makes the mismatch obvious. Constellation works by watching six correlated crypto markets and taking the one that has not moved yet — see the strategy write-up. A prime-ministerial race has no correlated twin lagging half a percent behind it. There is nothing for the method to grip.
So we did the thing the data does support: read the market carefully, write down the mechanism, and publish it.
Eleven sections, in the same order every time
- The board. Every outcome with its Yes price, which is the market’s probability, plus the change in percentage points and a normalised column beside it.
- Price history. A day, a week, or the whole life of the market.
- The mechanism. This is the section that changes per market: where the seats landed and the parliamentary vote that follows, or the rate path and how the committee is likely to split, or the clock a ceasefire market runs on and what does and does not reset it.
- Factors behind the price, each with a 1–5 judgement of how much it actually moves the outcome.
- Our model. The number built from its parts, with the inputs exposed so you can overwrite ours and watch the result move.
- Order book. Resting Yes orders on the front-runners, with depth counted within 5¢ of the best price, so you can tell a thin book from a real one.
- Money flow. Dollars traded per hour over 36 hours, for versus against, single fills of $1,000 or more, volume by outcome, and the largest Yes holders.
- What happens next. The dates that matter, from the official schedule.
- News that moved it, newest first, each item dated and sourced.
- Rules and sources. How the market resolves in its own words, and where every number came from.
Live numbers from Polymarket, written analysis from us
Prices, history, order-book depth, volume and holders are pulled from Polymarket’s public APIs and refresh about once a minute while the page is open. Nothing there is our estimate.
Everything written — the factors, the model, the timeline, the news — is our own reading, and carries an “Analysis as of” date at the top of the page so you can see how fresh it is. A few house rules we hold ourselves to:
- Every claim is dated and sourced. If a fact has no source we can point at, it does not go on the page.
- When something is genuinely unknown — a disputed resolution with no published reason, for instance — the board says so instead of inventing an explanation.
- Prices across outcomes usually add up to more than 100%. That is the overround, and it is normal. We show the raw price and a normalised column side by side rather than quietly rescaling one into the other.
- Resolved markets stay up. A settled board is the most useful thing on the desk: you can see what the price did in the last hours before it was decided.
What is on the desk now
We opened with three boards: who will be Sweden’s next Prime Minister, worked through the seat count and the Riksdag vote that actually installs a government; the Fed’s September decision, with the rate path, the voting committee member by member, and how the odds reacted to each data release; and a resolved board on the US–Iran two-week pause, kept up as a worked example of a market being decided against its own rules.
Boards come and go as markets resolve. The hub at /politics always lists what is live.
5MTBot is independent software for Polymarket and is not affiliated with it. The analysis on the politics desk is our own reading, not financial advice, and we do not trade these markets for you or for ourselves.
Boards refresh live while the page is open. The bot, meanwhile, is busy with the 5-minute rounds.