Pool share versus chance
Learn why a share of a pool is different from a probability.
The number is a share#
On a pool market the percentage beside an outcome is
that outcome's principal ÷ the whole pot
and nothing more. It is what the contract's own view reports, and the interface labels it crowd or share and never "probability" or "odds". A share of the pot tells you what the crowd has done with its money; it does not tell you what the crowd believes, and the two diverge by design, because early money is weighted and late money is not.
The share is always computed from principal, never from the weighted pools. The weighted vector encodes a recency bonus, not a belief, and plotting it would draw a number that moves when nobody has changed their mind.
Why it is sometimes withheld#
The first position in every pool market makes the display read 0% or 100%. That is not an edge case; it is the guaranteed opening state of every market, and it is meaningless. A pool share is monotone in your own position, with no counterparty to refuse you, so one wallet can set the number to anything at the cost of diluting itself.
So the interface publishes the share only when all five of these hold, and otherwise prints the evidence and no number:
| Condition | Threshold |
|---|---|
| the pot | at least 500 USDG |
| funded outcomes | at least two |
| participants | at least five |
| concentration | no single position over 60% of the pot |
| age | open for at least one hour |
When the share is withheld, the reasons are listed on the page in plain words — "pool below 500 USDG", "only one outcome funded" — and the pot size and participant count are shown instead. Hiding the pool while hiding the odds would look like hiding something. The verdict travels with the market data from the server, so no screen can decide for itself to print a share the gate withholds.
The frozen-pot quote#
The ticket shows what a position would pay if the pools stayed exactly as they are now. It is a quote from the contract's own view, it is marked provisional, and it is never drawn as a price line. Every person who joins the pool after you makes your slice smaller, and every person who joins the other side makes it larger; the frozen quote is the one number that can be computed honestly and it is labelled with its assumption.
A share is not a price#
The order book, where it exists, quotes a bid and an ask for a share that pays exactly 1 USDG. That is a price, and the chart draws it as one, with the spread visible as a ribbon so a wide market looks wide before anyone reads a number. The two venues return different shapes from the data layer so that no component can synthesise a spread for a pool market, and the pool chart is a step rather than a curve because a pool's composition literally does not move between positions. See Charts and time ranges.