The Minutes Myth

The finding Prediction markets are supposed to be fast. The received wisdom is that they reprice within minutes of a headline, which would mean the number on your screen already contains the news. We timed 90,633 Polymarket reactions of two cents or more, dated by when the news broke, across eight weeks from April 29 to June 26, 2026. The median took 80.1 minutes. No category escapes it. Geopolitics, the subject the speed narrative is built on, took 79.1 minutes. Politics, the fastest major category, still took 75.1. Every major category’s median landed between 75.1 and 81.9 minutes, and once the intervals allow for reactions clustering inside 2,070 markets, five of the six cover the pooled 80.1. Not one is fast. Prediction markets grind toward a new price. They do not snap to it. The Minutes Myth · Vera Research The method A reaction is one headline paired to one market. We date it by when the news broke, not by when our pipeline wrote the row: on that basis the same records spread across months outside the eight-week window. A move counts when the market’s price change reaches two cents inside a two-hour window, and the time we report is the median minutes from the headline to th...