# Why a market price is worth reading in the first place candidatecasino.com publishes prediction-market prices as one input alongside polls because a market forces every participant to back an opinion with money — this post sets out why that mechanism tends to aggregate information well, not why any single price is correct. By candidatecasino.com — Last updated: 2026-08-25 *An illustrative diagram, not real trader data: many independently informed participants, each acting on a different slice of information, converge on one traded price.* ## A price is a bet, not an opinion poll A poll asks people what they think will happen. A prediction market asks them to put money behind it, and to keep updating that position as new information arrives. That difference in incentive is the whole argument for reading market prices at all: a trader who is wrong loses money to a trader who is right, and a trader with private information — a local poll not yet public, a sense of turnout on the ground — has a direct financial reason to trade on it rather than sit on it. ## Aggregating what no one participant knows alone No single trader on a market like the ones candidatecasino.com tracks has full information about how an election will go. Each one holds a different, partial slice — a poll they trust more than others, a read on one region, a hunch about turnout — and trades on that slice. The price that results is not any one trader's forecast; it is what falls out of all of those partial views being priced against each other, each participant correcting the price where they think it is wrong and being corrected in turn where they are. This is the same argument behind estimating a jar's contents by averaging many independent guesses rather than trusting any one guesser — dispersed information, each held by someone with no reason to share it for free, gets pulled into one number because trading against a wrong price is how a participant profits from being right. ## Where the mechanism breaks down The aggregation only works as well as the incentives behind it. A thin, illiquid market with few traders and little money at stake reflects fewer independent views, and its price can sit stale or swing on a single large order — this is exactly why candidatecasino.com's own consensus calculation excludes a source that has gone quiet for more than six hours, and why volume weighting, not a plain average, is used when combining venues. A market can also only price what its resolution criteria actually ask about — see the methodology page for how this site treats a market's settlement mechanics as separate from the real-world question it is pricing. *Illustrative only: two hypothetical markets, one thin and one liquid, showing how much a single same-size order could move each one's price. Not a measurement of any real venue.* ## Mentioned in this post - [The 2026 general election](https://candidatecasino.com/en/sweden/2026/general-election/) ## About the odds The consensus figure is a weighted average of de-vigged odds from the sources pricing this outcome. - [Methodology](https://candidatecasino.com/en/info/methodology/) - [About](https://candidatecasino.com/en/info/about/) — candidatecasino.com - [About](https://candidatecasino.com/en/info/about/) - [Privacy](https://candidatecasino.com/en/info/privacy/) - [Methodology](https://candidatecasino.com/en/info/methodology/) - [Svenska](https://candidatecasino.com/sv/sverige/analys/darfor-fungerar-prediktionsmarknader/)