Last updated: 2026-05-01.
Every DissMarket question begins with a live Polymarket market. We do not invent questions or run polls on topics that lack a liquid prediction-market counterpart. That constraint is deliberate: the entire value of the DissMarket Index is the side-by-side comparison between what money says and what the public says. Without a priced market on the other side, our poll is just a poll.
Within the universe of live Polymarket markets, we apply three filters before mirroring a question.
Liquidity and volume. The underlying market must have meaningful trading volume. Thinly traded markets produce noisy prices that are poor reference points. We do not publish a hard dollar threshold because liquidity standards differ across categories, but as a rule we look for markets with at least several hundred thousand dollars in cumulative volume and consistent daily trading activity.
Public salience. The question must be one that a general audience can understand and has a reason to care about. Highly technical or niche contract specifications may be valuable in a trading context but do not produce meaningful divergence data when posed to a broad public audience. We favour questions that intersect with news cycles, elections, geopolitics, and cultural events.
Clean resolution criteria. The underlying Polymarket market must have unambiguous resolution criteria that we can reproduce verbatim. If the resolution language is disputed, unclear, or relies on a source that may not publish in time, we skip it. We link to the original resolution criteria on every chart we publish.
DissMarket currently operates across the following market categories. Coverage depth varies; we add markets as events warrant, not on a fixed schedule.
US elections and primaries. Presidential nominations, general election outcomes, primary winners, and party-level questions. This is our deepest category and the origin of the DissMarket Index. Election questions tend to produce the largest and most sustained divergences between market pricing and public opinion, which is precisely what makes them valuable.
Geopolitics and conflict. Ceasefire probabilities, territorial outcomes, diplomatic milestones. These markets tend to be volatile and public opinion tends to lag price movements, making the divergence signal especially interesting for researchers tracking sentiment versus information flow.