The Overround / The Week in Margins
Same exchange, same week, same screen. The difference between the cheapest and dearest book on the board is 35.7 points, and almost nobody trading either one could tell you that.
Every price you see quoted anywhere has a markup inside it. Add up what it costs to back every outcome of a market and a fair book comes to 100%. Anything above that is the house's, paid by whoever trades, on whichever side. That figure is called the overround, it is trivially computable from public order books, and essentially nobody publishes it.
So we write it down every day. Here is what the last 2 days say.
The dearest market on the board this week is “Oscar Winner: Best Picture” at 139%. The cheapest is “KXBALANCEPOWERCOMBO-27FEB” at 103.3%.
There is a pattern in that, and it is not flattering to anyone who thinks of these venues as neutral infrastructure. The tight books are the ones being watched: heavily traded political contracts where a fat spread would be arbitraged away by lunchtime. The wide ones are the quiet corners. Awards. Appointments. Anything where the crowd is thin enough that nobody is checking.
That is not a scandal, it is how market making works everywhere. It is only a scandal that the number is invisible at the moment you trade.
The average book across everything we priced went up 1.4 points this week, from 109.2% to 110.6%.
Restricted to the 15 markets that had a book on all 2 days, the move is +1 points, which agrees with the headline figure. That is reassuring rather than exciting.
| Market | 2026-08-11 | 2026-08-12 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| RSENATESEATS-27 | 112% | 122% | +10 |
| Oscar Winner: Best Picture | 135% | 139% | +4 |
| KXBALANCEPOWERCOMBO-27FEB | 100.3% | 103.3% | +3 |
| Who will successfully take over Warner Brothers? | 102% | 105% | +3 |
| 2026 Midterms: House popular vote margin of victory? (Generic ballot) | 113.4% | 110.5% | -2.9 |
| KXRHOUSESEATS-27 | 110.4% | 108.5% | -1.9 |
| KXDHOUSESEATS-27 | 112.1% | 110.5% | -1.6 |
We could only price the same question at both venues on 1 occasion this week, and mostly on the same market, so there is no venue comparison worth printing yet. It is tempting to run the average anyway. Five observations of one market is not a finding, it is a rumour with a decimal point.
The reason the sample is small is deliberate: our matcher refuses to pair two markets unless the outcome names line up and the prices agree to within five cents, because the alternative is publishing a fake arbitrage, which we have done once and do not intend to do again. It is on the corrections page.
Every figure above comes from prices this site recorded itself, once a day, at a fixed hour, and stored. Nothing is backfilled and nothing is modelled. The raw snapshots are public at /api/snapshot, one file per day, free to use with attribution. This page regenerates from them, so it is not an opinion held in a database, it is the arithmetic run again each time you load it.
A book is only published for a market when every active contract in it is quoting, because a partial sum is not a book. The scale on the chart starts at 100% for the same reason the number matters: 100% is what a fair market costs, and everything to the right of that line is the toll.