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Collective
Conviction
What $8 Billion in Prediction Markets Reveals About American Democracy
What $8 Billion in Prediction Markets Reveals About American Democracy
of all prediction market contracts resolve NO.
The crowd is wrong about the future roughly three times out of four.
After analyzing 28,798 resolved markets and $7.9 billion in transaction data, one pattern dominates everything. This book explains what it means — and what it tells us about American democracy.
"On the morning of November 6, 2024, as America woke up to the results of its presidential election, a 34-year-old software developer in Austin sat at his laptop watching a number tick upward on his screen. Not an electoral vote count. A price.
The Polymarket contract 'Will Donald Trump win the 2024 US Presidential Election?' had opened the year at 47 cents. By morning it settled at $1.00. He had bought at 52 cents. He made $240,000.
This book is about what made that trade possible — not the money, but the mechanism."
Every market tells a story about what Americans believed, when they believed it, and how much they were willing to bet on it.
| Category | Markets | Volume | % of Total | YES% | NO% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Politics / Election | 1,116 | 90.0% | 22.9% | 77.1% | |
| Crypto | 596 | 2.5% | 15.4% | 84.6% | |
| Economics / Finance | 187 | 1.5% | 19.3% | 80.7% | |
| Geopolitics | 273 | 0.4% | 11.0% | 89.0% | |
| Sports / NBA | 776 | 0.2% | 0.6% | 99.4% | |
| Sports / NFL | 283 | 0.1% | 4.6% | 95.4% |
Joe Greenwood is a systematic trader and software developer based in Grand Forks, North Dakota. He is the founder of Greenwood Financial Intelligence, a financial data platform that aggregates SEC insider trading signals, congressional trading disclosures, and prediction market data into a unified intelligence product.
He built the infrastructure underlying this book — the EDGAR monitoring system, the congressional trading parser, and the compound signal engine — on a $20-per-month server over the course of a single week in May 2026.
He is not an academic. He is not a political scientist. He is someone who looked at the data and couldn't stop thinking about what it meant.
Get the free research note — key findings from the prediction market dataset behind the book.
The 2028 presidential election will generate an estimated $10–50 billion in prediction market volume. Read the book that maps the psychological, political, and financial infrastructure of that moment — before it arrives.
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