By Tuesday's close the Iran-strike market had drifted further from where it opened the week — with most of the movement concentrated in two large orders rather than thin steady volume. A casual scan of the leaderboard would call this the week's most active market. It is not, in any sense that matters, the week's most informative one.
The corresponding Kalshi contract told a different story, which is exactly the kind of cross-venue divergence the forthcoming index is designed to absorb. Volume on its own is a measurement of motion, not of conviction; the prediction-market press tends to conflate the two.
Volume is a measurement of motion, not of conviction.
On the limits of leaderboards
The standard prediction-market site presents volume as a primary ranking signal. This is structurally inverted: volume is what you measure last, after weighting by depth at midpoint, fee-adjusting, and reconciling resolution criteria across venues. Otherwise a single large order on a thinly-traded market reads, on the leaderboard, indistinguishable from a thousand small orders on a deeply-traded one.
A separate concern is the question of what is being measured. The Iran-strike market and the Kalshi equivalent do not, on inspection, resolve on the same criteria. The publication will return to this point at length in a forthcoming essay on resolution-criteria awareness.