Jump to section
The premise
Every market on Hero Market is a question with a clear yes-or-no answer and a hard deadline. Will Olipop hit 75K doors by Q1? Will the FDA approve a generic semaglutide before July 31? Will Liquid Death announce a non-water beverage in 2026?
You buy YES or NO shares. The price moves with the trades. When the market resolves, the winning side cashes out at face value and the losing side goes to zero.
There is no real money. We measure who has the most signal, not who has the most chips. Sugar Capital uses the aggregate tape inside our portfolio work.
Anatomy of a market
Every market shows you the same three things up front: the question, the price, and the deadline. The price is quoted as a percent. Price is probability. A YES at 72% means traders collectively put the chance at 72%.
Will Magic Spoon land in Target’s main cereal aisle by Q1?
Closes in 6 weeks · YES if SKUs appear in the main aisle (not end-of-aisle) before Mar 31.
Read the price as a probability, not a stock quote. A share that resolves YES pays exactly 1 SP. Buying at 22¢ when the true probability is closer to 50% is good business; buying at 95¢ on a coin flip is not.
Underdog
Market thinks it's unlikely. YES is cheap; NO is the consensus.
Coin flip
Market hasn't decided. Both sides cost the same.
Heavy favorite
Market believes it. YES is expensive; NO is the contrarian play.
Lifecycle
Every market follows the same four-stage arc. It opens with a seed price and seed liquidity, traders push it around, the clock runs out, and we resolve against the stated criteria.
- Open
Market launches at 50% with seed liquidity from the house.
- Trade
Traders buy YES or NO. Every trade moves the pool, and the price.
- Close
Trading halts at the close date. Positions are locked.
- Resolve
Admin reads the criteria literally. Winners get 1 SP per share.
The price at any moment is a live snapshot of the crowd. The price at resolution is just a memorial; what counts at that point is whether the outcome was YES or NO.
Trading mechanics
Hero Market uses a Maniswap AMM, the same constant-product market-maker pattern Manifold popularized. You trade against the pool, not a counterparty. Each trade moves the pool, which moves the price.
Bigger trades move the price more. The cost of 100 shares isn’t a flat price × 100. The pool rebalances as you go, so the average cost rises. The trade form shows the realized average cost before you commit.
Small trade
Buy 25 SP of YES
Before
50%
After
52%
YES shares received
49
Avg cost / share
51¢
Large trade
Buy 250 SP of YES
Before
50%
After
69%
YES shares received
417
Avg cost / share
60¢
Same pool, same direction. The 10× larger trade pushes the price 17 points further and pays 9¢ more per share. That gap is slippage; it’s real money in real markets, play money here.
Sells are first-class. If you bought YES at 30% and the market climbs to 70%, you can sell back to the pool to lock in the gain instead of waiting for resolution.
Sugar Points
Sugar Points (SP)are the site’s currency. Play money. No real cash, no withdrawals, no regulator. New traders start with 1,000 SP. Winning trades add to your balance; losing trades come out of it. Liquidity subsidies pay the early trader and keep the spread tight.
You never run out. Your balance is floored at 1,000 SP. A user who buys 500 SP of YES and loses stays at 1,000; the same user who wins gets the payout added on top. SP is the ammo that lets you trade, not the scoreboard. The real scoreboard is realized P&L on the leaderboard and the Brier calibration on /accuracy. Those numbers track your actual edge, can go negative, and aren’t restocked.
Real-money prediction markets in the US carry a regulatory tax that compresses the surface to a few big questions. We care about signal in the long tail: beverage launches, retailer category shifts, founder moves. Play money lets us cover that surface freely.
Resolution
Every market has explicit resolution criteria printed on the page and a primary source. After the close date, an admin reads the criteria literally and resolves YES, NO, or invalidates the market.
- Step 1
Read the criteria
Open the market page. The resolution criteria are printed verbatim under the question.
- Step 2
Check the source
Each market names a primary source: SEC filing, FDA approval, BevNET, retailer announcement.
- Step 3
YES, NO, or Invalid
Source confirms the criteria → YES. Contradicts → NO. Criteria too ambiguous → Invalid, all positions refunded.
We do not interpret. We do not extrapolate. If the criteria say “reports 75K+ doors”, that’s what we look for. Ambiguity is a market-design failure. Flag it in the comments and we’ll fix the criteria before close, or invalidate at resolution if we missed it.
Winning shares convert to 1 SP each and land in the holder’s balance. Losing shares vanish.
Accuracy
Volume isn’t skill. Anyone can fire 10,000 SP at a coin flip. We score traders on calibration: a Brier score over the price you traded at versus the actual outcome, surfaced alongside SP on the leaderboard.
A calibrated trader who says YES at 70% should win about 70% of the time. The accuracy page plots the global calibration curve, Metaculus-style, so you can see how the platform is doing in aggregate.
When traders said
10%
resolved YES
12%
When traders said
30%
resolved YES
28%
When traders said
50%
resolved YES
51%
When traders said
70%
resolved YES
68%
When traders said
90%
resolved YES
92%
When the red tick lands near the top of the blue fill, the crowd was right on average. Persistent gaps in one direction mean Hero Market is over- or under-confident, and the Brier score on every trader profile is built from exactly this comparison.
Discovery
Four discovery shelves sit at the top of /markets. Below them is the full slate, filterable by status, category, and close window.
- On the wireThe markets the consumer-brand press is covering most right now. News-momentum driven; auto-refreshes as stories land.
- TrendingVolume and price movement over the last 24 hours.
- Closing soonMarkets resolving inside the next 7 days. Last chance to take a position.
- Most discussedWhere the comment activity is happening right now.
The categories are how operators organize their attention. Pick the beat you know best; that’s where you have edge.
- Beverage
- Snack
- Beauty
- Retail
- Capital
- Regulation
The other lever is following the people. Hit Trackon any trader’s profile to pin them to your watch. Their new positions land in your notifications as they happen, so the operators you trust become a live shortlist of where to look next.
/activity is the live tape: every trade, real time. The tape tells you what the crowd is doing right now, not what they did last week.
Hover to pause. The real tape on /activity is filterable by side, category, and trade size.
The beta
Hero Market is an invite-only closed beta, currently scoped to operators in consumer brands: founders, brand leads, retail buyers, investors, the press that covers them. Across consumer brands: apparel, beverage, media, retail, tech, auto. The Hero Market team runs the site and trades alongside everyone else; the prices you see are the trader base’s collective belief, not a curated view.
We’re intentionally small. The signal is only as good as the trader base, and we’d rather have 200 sharp operators than 20,000 noise.
To request an invite, ask a current trader for their referral, or write us at hello@heromarket.com with a sentence on what category you cover.
Glossary
The vocabulary, defined once so the rest of the site doesn’t need to keep redefining it.
- Sugar Points (SP)
- Site currency. Play money. New traders start with 1,000 SP, and the balance is floored at 1,000: you can lose down to the floor, never below.
- YES / NO share
- A claim that pays 1 SP if the market resolves to that side; 0 if it doesn't.
- Maniswap AMM
- Constant-product market maker that prices YES/NO from the pool ratio.
- Brier score
- Calibration metric. Lower is better. Penalizes overconfidence and underconfidence.
- Subsidy
- House liquidity seeded into the pool at open so early traders have a counterparty.
- Resolution criteria
- The written rule that decides YES or NO. Read literally, never extrapolated.
FAQ
The questions we get most often.