Common Mistakes to Avoid

Most losses in prediction markets don't come from bad luck. They come from a handful of repeatable mistakes.

Confusing a market price with certainty. A market pricing something at 90% isn't saying it's guaranteed, it's saying the crowd currently believes it's roughly nine times more likely than not. Ten percent chances happen all the time.

Not checking the resolution source before betting, only after. By the time a dispute happens, it's too late to have wanted better information.

Sizing a position like it can't go wrong. The single fastest way to turn a bad week into a genuinely damaging one is committing an amount that actually hurts if you're wrong, rather than an amount you'd be fine losing entirely.

Chasing a loss immediately after taking one. The urge to "win it back" right away is one of the most well documented patterns in how people make worse decisions under emotional pressure, not just in prediction markets, in any activity involving risk.

Only ever betting on categories you don't actually understand. The people who do best tend to start in a category they already follow closely, sports they watch, an industry they work in, not the flashiest headline market of the week.

None of these are complicated. They're just easy to forget in the moment, which is exactly why they're worth writing down.