Polymarket takes roughly 80 minutes to fully reprice after major news events

The world’s largest prediction market isn’t nearly as fast as you’d think. Despite operating on blockchain infrastructure capable of near-instant settlement, Polymarket’s prices take a surprisingly long time to fully digest breaking news, with full repricing stretching out to approximately 80 minutes after major events hit the wire.

For a platform that has positioned itself as the internet’s real-time truth machine, that’s a meaningful lag. It suggests prediction markets, for all their hype as superior forecasting tools, still process information more like a slightly caffeinated human than a high-frequency trading algorithm.

The underreaction problem

Academic research has started to quantify just how sluggish these markets can be. A study examining high-frequency trading on prediction market contracts found that price changes carry a coefficient of roughly 0.64 relative to benchmark probabilities derived from public data. In simpler terms: when new information suggests a contract should move by 10 percentage points, these markets tend to move only about 6.4 points initially.

That gap doesn’t close instantly. Instead, prices drift toward their “correct” level over the subsequent minutes. Most of the observable retracement happens within a 1-to-30-minute window after major news breaks.

This pattern of systematic underreaction isn’t unique to Polymarket. It appears consistently across multiple prediction market platforms, suggesting it’s a structural feature of these markets rather than a bug specific to any single venue.

Lower liquidity makes the problem worse. When fewer traders are active, the gap between where prices should be and where they actually sit widens, and the time needed for full correction grows.

Why the lag exists

The 0.64 coefficient is telling in this context. It means that even the traders who do react quickly aren’t fully confident in their assessment, or aren’t willing to deploy enough capital to move prices all the way to fair value in one shot. They nibble rather than bite, and the market inches toward accuracy rather than leaping to it.

Allegations and scrutiny

Polymarket has faced scrutiny over trades connected to Iranian geopolitical developments in early 2026, with critics raising concerns about whether some traders might have access to information before it becomes public.

The platform’s explosive growth has only amplified these concerns. Trading volumes surged during the 2024 US presidential election cycle and continued climbing through 2025 and into 2026, drawing a larger and more diverse user base.

For traders, the research points to a concrete, if narrow, opportunity. Systematic underreaction means that the first movers after a news event can capture value by trading against the initial price before the market catches up.