The World Cup Expedition
Started June 12, 2026 (day 2 of the tournament) · updates through the final
The biggest betting event on earth is running on a transparent exchange for the first time at this scale. We're recording all of it — every price, every wallet-attributed fill, every 20 minutes, all tournament — and publishing, in advance, exactly what we'll do with it. No picks. No bets. A data expedition with the methodology pre-registered, so the results (including a null) will mean something.
The pre-registered plan (written June 12, before any results)
So that we can't be accused of moving the goalposts later, here is the entire methodology, published in advance:
1. Collect everything. Prices and the wallet-attributed trade tape for every match market, all tournament, captured continuously (this data cannot be reconstructed later — in-play volume buries it within hours).
2. Select on the group stage only. When the group stage ends, we rank wallets by pre-match P&L across those 48 matches — exactly the leaderboard we built for MLB.
3. Test forward on the knockouts. The selected wallets' knockout-round performance is the only evidence that counts. In our MLB study, three separate eras showed in-sample leaderboards carry zero forward skill (rank correlation ≈ 0). That is the null hypothesis here, and we expect it to hold. If it doesn't — if World Cup pre-match wallets show real persistence — that would be a finding worth the whole tournament.
4. We do not bet the World Cup. We have no validated soccer model. This is a data expedition, recorded in public, in real time.
Match log
| Date | Fixture · what the money did | Result |
|---|---|---|
| 06-11 | South Africa vs Mexico AN displayed N/A for ALL fields (no odds/splits data on this fixture) | South Africa 0 - 2 Mexico |
| 06-11 | Czechia vs Korea Public over (90/87) HIT (3 goals). Mild +2 sharp lean on CZE MISSED (Korea won at +205 best with 57% of tickets). First two structured WC data points. | Czechia 1 - 2 Korea |
| 06-12 | Bosnia and Herzegovina vs Canada DRAW (+308 best) cashed. Public over (89/84) MISSED (2 goals). Morning +7 money lean on BIH faded to +5 and missed outright (draw). WC dataset: public-over now | Bosnia and Herzegovina 1 - 1 Canada |
| 06-12 | Paraguay vs United States USA won 4-1 (favorite, public 85/85 aligned, no divergence). o2.5 OVER (5 goals) - public over (92/91) HIT big. Pre-match USA line had drifted -101->+106-110 (m | Paraguay 1 - 4 United States |
Journal
Friday, June 12, 2026 — Day 2: the machine is on
We started capturing on day 2 of the tournament: every listed match (70 events, three markets each — home / away / draw), the full futures complex, and an incremental wallet-level trade tape, every 20 minutes, around the clock. First baseline grab: ~37MB of fills. For scale: a single group game (Korea–Czechia) traded $15.5M on Polymarket — roughly a thousand times what an MLB game trades there in June. This pond has real fish, or at least real water.
We also cracked the sportsbook-splits format for soccer's three-way markets and logged our first divergence: 89% of tickets on Canada vs. Bosnia, but the money leaning Bosnia at +380. Filed, not bet — see the rules below.
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