Event Contract Prices & Implied Probability: Beginner Guide

When you see an outcome priced at 30¢ on GADUIN, that number tells you something exact: the market is giving that outcome a 30% chance. This is the single most important thing to understand before your first trade. Learn to read it and every price on the site starts making sense — including the ones you disagree with, which are the only ones worth trading.

What Is an Event Contract? (60-Second Recap)

An event contract is a financial instrument that settles on a real-world outcome. On GADUIN the events are transport-specific: a flight delayed past a set threshold, a vessel arriving late at port, a train missing its timetabled arrival.

A punctuality market on one named service settles three ways, not two: On time, Delayed or Cancelled. A cancellation is its own outcome, not an extreme delay. Count markets — how many ships cleared a passage in a week, how many flights left an airport in a day — are the genuine yes-or-no case: did the number clear the threshold fixed before the market opened?

The unit you own is a share. One share pays $1.00 if its outcome is the one that happens, and $0 if it is not. Every price in between those two ends is the market’s live reading of the chance.

For a full breakdown of the underlying mechanics, see how flight delay event contracts work.

What a Price Means on GADUIN

Elsewhere, a number quoted at you needs translating — fractions, decimals, money lines, each adding a layer of mental arithmetic before you know what you are being offered. Here, the price of a share is the chance. No conversion table needed.

Why the Price Is the Chance

A share pays exactly $1.00 or exactly $0. That single fact does all the work. If an outcome were genuinely certain, a share in it would be worth $1.00. If it were impossible, $0. Anything in between has to sit where it sits because of how likely the people trading it think it is — a share at 30¢ only makes sense for a roughly 30% chance, because at 60¢ it would be too expensive for the same outcome and at 10¢ too cheap.

So the price is not a quote you are being handed. It is what the argument currently looks like, in one number, and it moves as people trade: buying an outcome pushes its price up, and buying another outcome in the same market pushes it down. GADUIN adds no commission on top of it, so the price you read is the price you pay.

The 1¢–99¢ Scale Explained

Every outcome in an open market carries a live price between 1¢ and 99¢. The read-out is direct:

Price	Chance the market gives it	What that reads as
10¢	10%	The market thinks this is unlikely
25¢	25%	Below even
50¢	50%	A genuine coin-flip
70¢	70%	The market leans this way
90¢	90%	The market treats this as close to settled

All values are illustrative examples, not live market data.

An outcome at 67¢ is a 67% chance — full stop. Note the ends of the scale: a price never reaches 0¢ or $1.00 while a market is open, because no open market can claim to be certain.

Implied Probability — The Core Concept

The chance the market gives an outcome is not written out anywhere. It is carried in the price, and you read it out.

The Formula: Price × 100 = Chance (%)

The conversion is intentionally simple:

Chance (%) = price in dollars × 100

Examples:

• An outcome at 30¢ → a 30% chance
• An outcome at 55¢ → a 55% chance
• An outcome at 82¢ → an 82% chance

That is the complete formula. If you can read a price and multiply by 100, you can read any market on GADUIN.

How to Convert a Percentage Back Into a Price

The reverse calculation is what tells you whether a market is worth trading. If you put the chance of a delay at 40%, you would expect the delayed outcome to be priced near 40¢. A market showing 28¢ is giving the same event a 28% chance — below your estimate. Whether that gap is an opportunity depends entirely on the quality of your information, not on the size of the gap.

The price your own view implies (in cents) = your estimate of the chance (%)

This two-way translation is the whole of pre-trade evaluation. You are never asking “will this flight be late”. You are asking “is this price wrong, and do I know why”.

Worked Example — Reading a Flight Delay Market on GADUIN

The following is a fully illustrative scenario. It demonstrates the mechanics; no actual flight, price or outcome is described.

Example: the delayed outcome at 30¢

A market covers a hypothetical Madrid–London departure at 14:00. The market’s own title states its terms: delayed means more than 60 minutes late, measured against the scheduled arrival named in those terms. At 09:00 on the day of travel, the delayed outcome is trading at 30¢.

What that price tells you:

• The market gives the flight a 30% chance of arriving more than 60 minutes late.
• The remaining 70¢ is divided between the other two outcomes — perhaps 67¢ on time and 3¢ cancelled. All three sum to about $1.00, and reading all three is how you see what the market actually believes.

A trader who puts the chance of that delay at 50% — having looked at the inbound aircraft, the board and the weather — might buy the delayed outcome at 30¢. They are paying 30¢ for something they think is worth 50¢.

If the flight arrives inside the threshold, those shares pay $0. If it arrives more than 60 minutes late, each one pays $1.00 — 70¢ more than they paid. If the flight never operates, the cancelled outcome is what pays, and the delayed shares still pay $0. That third possibility is exactly why reading all three prices matters.

What Happens at Settlement?

When trading closes, the market settles automatically against the terms fixed when it opened. A flight market settles on the destination airport operator’s published arrival time against its published schedule. There is no claims process, no review and no document to submit, and nobody at GADUIN decides the result.

If the record is ever unclear — missing, late, or two sources disagreeing — settlement pauses and a person resolves it within 24 hours against those same fixed terms. If no outcome can be established at all, the market is voided and every position is refunded in full.

For how outcomes are established, see how GADUIN settles flight delay contracts. For the settlement flow itself, see how GADUIN settles contracts in USDT.

How Prices Move (and What That Signals)

Prices are not static. They update as people trade on new information, and knowing what drives that is most of what reading a live market involves.

A Rising Price Means the Market Is Leaning That Way

If the delayed outcome on that hypothetical Madrid–London flight moves from 30¢ to 55¢ through the morning, the market has revised the chance from 30% to 55%. People have traded, and the price moved because they did.

Things that commonly push a delayed outcome up:

• Ground delays reported at the departure airport
• Weather deteriorating along the route
• The same aircraft arriving late on a prior leg
• Airspace congestion becoming visible on the board

Each fact that raises the likelihood of a delay pushes the price up as people act on it. Reassuring facts — clear conditions, an aircraft parked at the gate on time — push it back down. The price is a compressed summary of what the people trading it currently believe, updated only when one of them does something about it.

Reading All Three Outcomes Together

A punctuality market has three sides, and their prices sum to about $1.00. If delayed is at 40¢, the other 60¢ is divided between on time and cancelled.

That sum is your fastest sanity check. If the three prices in front of you do not add to roughly $1.00, look harder before trading — and if you think one of the three is badly wrong while the other two look right, you have found a specific disagreement rather than a vague hunch. Cancellation is the outcome most often ignored and most often mispriced, because it is the one people forget is a separate side.

Chance vs Reality — Can the Market Be Wrong?

The chance a market gives an outcome is an estimate, not a fact. Markets aggregate the views of the people trading them at a moment in time, weighted by money. They tend to be well-calibrated where a lot is known and a lot is being traded, and less so on sparse or novel situations.

Common reasons the price may sit away from a better estimate:

• Information lag: a known condition has not been priced in because nobody has traded on it yet
• A quiet market: few active participants means a single large trade moves the price further than the information justifies
• One-sided attention: if most of the people looking at a market arrived with the same view, the price can drift from a neutral reading

This is the fundamental source of risk — and, for a well-informed trader, the only source of edge. What the market gives is not a guarantee. It is a position in an argument that is still open, and it can be revised the moment somebody knows better.

For how GADUIN’s markets compare to broader prediction market platforms, see GADUIN vs Polymarket.

5 Common Beginner Mistakes When Reading a Price

1. Confusing the price with a guaranteed return. A share at 30¢ does not promise 70¢. It reflects a 30% chance. It pays $1.00 only if that outcome is the one that happens.

2. Ignoring how much is being traded. A price nobody has pushed against is a weaker signal than a price that has been tested. Check the volume on a market before treating its price as informative.

3. Treating 50¢ as “neutral” or “safe”. A 50% chance is a coin-flip, not a safe position. Trading at 50¢ with no informational advantage is paying full price for a random outcome.

4. Not reading the market’s own terms. Before opening any position, read the title: it states the threshold and the scheduled time that threshold is measured against. 15 minutes? 30? 60? Those terms are fixed before the first trade and never change, and they are what the price is actually about.

5. Forgetting the third outcome. On a punctuality market, on time and delayed are not the only sides. A cancellation pays on its own outcome and pays $0 on both of the others. Getting the direction right but the outcome wrong is the most common first-trade error.

FAQ — Reading a Price for Beginners

What does a price mean on an event contract? It is the chance the market is giving that outcome, expressed as what a share costs. A price of 65¢ means the market currently gives that outcome a 65% chance.

How do I convert a price into a percentage? Multiply by 100. A 42¢ share corresponds to a 42% chance. That is the whole conversion.

Is a 65¢ share the same as a 65% chance? Yes — that is the core insight. The price and the chance are two ways of writing the same number.

Can the market be wrong? Yes. A market aggregates opinions, not ground truth. In quiet markets especially, the price can sit well away from the best available estimate — which is the risk and the opportunity in the same sentence.

What if an outcome is priced at exactly 50¢? The market sees it as a coin-flip. Nothing about that price gives you an edge on its own; only your own information can.

Is the price a forecast from GADUIN? No. It is what people here are paying right now — not a forecast from us, and not an official status from the operator. GADUIN publishes no probability of its own. The record settles the market; the price is only what the argument looked like beforehand.

Where do I see the current chance for a flight on GADUIN? On the market page. The price displayed on each outcome is the chance — no separate conversion or tool is needed, because the number on screen already is the answer.