CME and Polymarket both signal Fed rate hold, but at different confidence levels

Two of the most-watched tools for gauging Federal Reserve policy expectations are telling roughly the same story right now, but they’re telling it at different volumes. CME’s FedWatch tool and Polymarket’s binary prediction contracts both point to the Fed holding rates steady at the September 15-16 FOMC meeting. The gap is in how confident each platform’s participants are about that outcome. Where the numbers stand The federal funds target range has sat at 3.50%-3.75% since at least the July 28-29 FOMC meeting. As of August 19-20, both CME and Polymarket showed strong odds that the Fed will leave that range untouched when policymakers meet again in September. CME’s FedWatch tool calculates its probabilities from 30-day fed funds futures prices, instruments traded overwhelmingly by professional fixed-income desks at banks, hedge funds, and asset managers. Polymarket takes a different approach entirely: users buy and sell simple yes/no contracts on whether a specific rate outcome will occur. Prediction market volumes for Fed events on Polymarket have reached tens to hundreds of millions of dollars across 2026 contracts, which sounds impressive until you compare it to the depth of the...