Terms

Short version: quote it, check it, argue with it, build on it. Do not republish it wholesale, and do not pass on the per-trade files.

The longer version is below, in plain words rather than the other kind.

What you may do, without asking

Quote any figure on this site. Every number here exists to be checked, and a number nobody repeats is a number nobody checks. Cite Pondletter and link back if the medium allows it. You do not need permission and you do not need to tell me.

Reproduce the reasoning. If a study here changes how you trade, that is the entire point. Nothing on this site is a licence you have to buy in order to use what you learned from it.

Recompute anything. Members get the per-trade files precisely so the board can be rebuilt from scratch rather than taken on faith. If your arithmetic disagrees with mine, publish that. A correction is worth more to this publication than a clean week.

Disagree in public. Several things here were fixed because a stranger said the number looked wrong. That is a feature of the thing, not a risk to it.

What is reserved

Wholesale republication. Copying a study, an issue or the Seats page into another publication is not quoting. The writing is mine. Excerpt it freely, do not lift it entire.

The per-trade files. These are for the member they were sent to. Each copy is watermarked: there is a licensed_to column on every row and the same token in the filename, so any copy can be traced back to the account it came from. This is stated in the covering email too, because a watermark nobody is told about deters nobody and only catches people afterwards, which is the least useful moment.

To be clear about why it exists. A complete machine-readable ledger is the one thing here that could be republished with nobody able to tell where it came from. Being able to trace that is what makes sending it out possible at all. The alternative was not sending it.

Your account. One person per subscription. Sharing a login is the ordinary sort of thing rather than a crime, but it is the difference between this being sustainable and not.

What is not mine to give

Kalshi's market data. The exchange reserves its own data, and their terms name the specific act of handing archived data sets to another person. So the lab records the raw order book for its own research and what reaches you is what the lab found in it, never the recordings themselves. If that ever changes it will be because a licence was agreed in writing, and it will be said here.

The same applies to the CF Benchmarks index, the exchange feeds behind the crypto work, and the live game data behind the esports work. The findings are mine. The feeds are not.

The unglamorous paragraph

Nothing here is financial advice or a recommendation to trade. No money is managed for anyone, no trades are placed for anyone, and no personalised guidance is offered. Prediction markets can lose you money quickly, and this lab loses money on paper most weeks and says so in public.

Everything is provided as is. The numbers are published in good faith, computed from records described openly enough that you can check them, and they are sometimes wrong. When they are, they get corrected here rather than quietly.

If you want to do something not covered

Reply to any issue, or write to the address in the footer. The answer is usually yes.