How Event Markets Works

The category moves faster than anyone can read it

Prediction markets are regulated in two directions at once. Federal derivatives law governs the contracts, and fifty states govern gambling, and the two do not agree. That disagreement plays out continuously across agency filings, federal dockets, statehouses and exchange rulebooks.

Legal status in this category is not stable, and it is not uniform. A state can change posture more than once in a year. An order can reach one contract category and leave every other one trading normally. A statute can be passed, repealed and replaced before it ever takes effect.

Event Markets reads all of it. Every day.

What gets read

A custom AI system monitors the whole category continuously:

• Federal. CFTC filings, self-certification submissions, advisories, letters and orders, plus the Federal Register.
• The courts. Active dockets across multiple circuits and district courts, with filings pulled as they land.
• The states. All fifty legislatures, gaming regulators and attorneys general.
• The exchanges. Rulebooks, fee schedules, contract listings, geographic restrictions and announcements.

When something moves, it surfaces with the underlying document attached. Alex McFarland decides what it means and what gets published.

Why this produces better intelligence

Machines read everything and never get bored. People know which of forty filings is the one that changes something. Running both is what makes this possible:

• All fifty states, tracked daily. Not the eight that generate headlines. The quiet jurisdictions are where a status change sits unnoticed for months, and they are checked with the same discipline as the loud ones.
• Refresh rates matched to velocity. A state under an active injunction is re-checked in under twenty-four hours. Every page carries the date it was last verified.
• The primary document on every claim. The order, the statute, the docket entry, the filing. Pulling those for every single assertion is what this system is built to do, which is why this site cites instruments rather than coverage of instruments.

That combination is how a category this fast gets covered completely.

The verification standard

Speed is the product, and accuracy is what makes speed worth paying attention to. The verification rules are strict and a human owns them.

Every factual claim traces to a primary source, and every number carries the date it was accurate as of. Sources rank in this order, strongest first: a court order or opinion as issued; a statute as enacted; a docket entry; a Federal Register document; an agency letter, advisory or order; an agency press release; a company filing, including exchange rulebooks and self-certification submissions; a company press release; trade press.

A law-firm client alert is a pointer here, not an authority. Those alerts are often the fastest way to learn a document exists, and the citation still goes to the document.

Where a page makes a legal claim, the key-facts grid carries the pinpoint citation: the statute section, the docket number, the Federal Register document number, or the case caption with court and date. The prose says what it means in plain English. Copy the citation into a memo, or just read the sentence.

The status scale

State pages and availability tables use six values, because the legal reality has six shapes. Most orders in force today reach sports contracts specifically and leave every other market category trading normally, and a legal-or-illegal binary flattens that distinction into something wrong.

• Clear. No state action, no pending litigation, no announced enforcement posture.
• Watch. Legislative activity, a regulator inquiry, or an announced review, but nothing operative.
• Contested. Active litigation or an enforcement action, with no order currently restricting trading.
• Partially blocked. An order in force reaching some contract categories, most often sports, while others remain available.
• Blocked. An order in force reaching event contracts broadly.
• Criminalized. A statute imposing criminal liability, in force or with a fixed effective date.

Every state page names the instrument that produces its status and says exactly what that instrument covers.

Counting rules

Volume figures in this industry are not comparable across sources, and the gap is large enough to move a headline. Notional prints routinely run two to three times matched-taker measures for the same venue and period, so two accurate numbers can describe the same month and differ by billions of dollars.

Every data page here states its denominator before it states a number. Where two measures exist for the same period, both appear. Knowing which one you are looking at is the difference between a figure you can use and a figure you can repeat.

Freshness

Every page carries a Verified date, and that date means one thing: a human re-checked its facts against primary sources that day. It moves on a real re-check. A typo fix does not move it, and neither does a redeploy.

Pages covering fast-moving legal status run short cycles measured in days, and the system flags a page the moment it goes past its cycle. Where a primary document has not yet been pulled for a cell in a table, that cell reads Unverified with the date of last check, so every confirmed cell on the site is genuinely confirmed.

Conflicts in the public record

Where credible sources disagree about a figure, both appear, both are attributed, and the page says which one remains unresolved. Several such conflicts are live right now across reported investment amounts, quarterly revenue figures, valuations, and even the number of states a federal regulator has sued.

Surfacing the disagreement is usually more useful than picking a side, and it is often the most interesting thing on the page.

Corrections

Corrections are appended to the page they affect and dated, and substantive ones are logged on the corrections page. If something here is wrong, say so, ideally with the document that shows it. It gets fixed fast.

Who runs it

Alex McFarland has written about artificial intelligence and emerging technology professionally since 2019 and builds AI-driven editorial systems that run at production scale for publishers. Event Markets is that capability pointed at a category he thinks is being under-covered relative to how fast it moves and how much money is now in it.

Questions, corrections, tips and documents are welcome.

Questions

Is this written by AI?

Yes, and that is the advantage. A custom AI system reads the filings, the dockets, and fifty statehouses every day. Alex McFarland built that system, edits what it surfaces, and puts his name on it. Machines read everything. A human decides what is true and what matters. Both, at speed.

How fast does this update?

Refresh cycles are set by how fast each subject moves. A state under an active court order is re-checked daily. A definitional page runs a longer cycle. Every page shows the date its facts were last verified, so you always know exactly how current what you are reading is.

What does the Verified date mean?

The page's facts were checked against primary sources on that date. It moves on a real re-check, never on a prose edit or a redeploy. That makes it a date you can rely on rather than decoration.

Why do some tables say Unverified?

Because the primary document for that cell has not been pulled yet, and we say so. You always know which cells are confirmed against a filing and which are still open. That is what makes the confirmed ones worth citing.

Why does the site sometimes print two different numbers for the same thing?

Because the public record disagrees, and knowing that is valuable. Where credible sources conflict, both figures appear with both sources. You get the disagreement itself, which is usually the more useful fact.