Last verified: 01 Aug 2026

Prediction-Market Monitoring: What It Is and How Traders Set It Up

Prediction-market monitoring is watching a defined set of markets against their own baselines so a repricing is noticed when it happens, not when someone scrolls past it later. Instead of staring at tabs on Polymarket and Kalshi, you put monitors on the markets you care about and let a system check the prices and flag the moves that matter.

What is prediction-market monitoring?

A prediction market prices a question as a probability, and that price moves as new information arrives. Monitoring is the discipline of catching those moves as they happen. You define which markets you care about, set what counts as a move worth knowing, and a system watches for it so you do not have to keep every tab open.

The key idea is that a market is judged against its own recent history, not a shared rule. A question that has been trading in a tight range and then breaks out is doing something different from one that swings wide every day. Monitoring against a per-market baseline separates the two, so the alerts you get are the ones that reflect an actual reprice rather than ordinary movement.

Monitoring vs signal services vs bots: what is the difference?

A signal service sells trade calls. It tells you which side to take and is prescriptive by design. A feed bot forwards a stream of raw events, usually large trades, into a channel and leaves the filtering to you. Monitoring sits between them in intent but apart in stance: it reports what a market did and attaches the numbers, and it stops there.

The distinction matters because it sets what you are trusting. With a signal service you trust a call. With a bot you trust yourself to sift a firehose. With monitoring you trust an observation: this market broke its own range, here is the price at the move, the price now, the spread, and the depth, decide for yourself. TruthPing is strictly observational. It never says which way to trade, never connects to a wallet, and never executes.

What should a monitoring setup actually watch?

Baselines, not raw price. A raw price threshold fires the same whether a market has been calm or wild, so it drowns you in noise on volatile questions and stays silent on the quiet ones that just broke out. Watching a per-market baseline asks the more useful question: is this move unusual for this market?

Order-book depth, because depth tells you whether a move can be trusted. A price change in a deep book took real size to produce. The same change in a thin book might be one small order. Depth belongs in the alert so you can weigh what you are looking at, and it belongs in the market-selection step so thin questions do not dominate your feed.

Volume, because attention often arrives before or alongside a price move, and a volume surge catches activity a price rule alone would miss. And single prints, because one outsized trade is a distinct event from a broad drift or a volume ramp. A good setup can flag each of these separately rather than collapsing them into one blunt alert.

How a default index works and why order-book depth decides it

Everyone starts on the same shipped default index: the top 75 markets by order-book depth across both Polymarket and Kalshi. It is a starting point, not a cage, and it is fully editable. The reason depth decides the ranking is that depth is the closest single proxy for whether a market matters.

Depth means the market can absorb real size. When a deep market reprices, someone moved money to make it happen, and that is the kind of event worth an alert. Thin markets produce noise alerts: a single order shoves the price, the baseline reacts, and you get pinged over nothing. Ranking by depth keeps the default index on markets where a repricing carries information, and because it is editable you can swap in the specific questions you follow.

A worked example

Say you follow a market on whether a particular policy passes by a deadline. It has been trading in the low 40s for a week. You put a monitor on it and set a repricing alert at 5 points, meaning you want to know if it moves and holds more than 5 points off its 7-day baseline. You set the threshold, and the price is checked every 30 seconds.

Two days later the market breaks to 49 and holds there. At the next 30-second check the condition is met and one Telegram message goes out. The receipt reads: price at the move, price now, spread at the time, order-book depth, and detection latency. One event, one message. The alert is permalinked in the public archive before the question resolves and graded after, so the record stands whether the move held up or faded.

How do you track Polymarket markets without watching tabs?

You hand the watching to a monitor. Add the Polymarket markets you care about to monitor slots, choose an alert type and threshold for each, and the price is checked every 30 seconds against your conditions. When one is met, the alert comes to Telegram with the full receipt. You do not keep the tab open, and you do not scroll a feed hoping to catch the move.

The free Scout tier gives you 5 monitor slots, each monitored market's first alert of the day in full, and full access to the Terminal and the public archive, with no card. Sharp is $29.99 per month for 50 slots, every alert every time it fires, full detail, and position radar, where you can flag "I'm in this" or paste a public Polymarket address, read-only, no keys. Read-only throughout: no custody, no wallet connection, no execution.

Frequently asked questions