The hurricane season stretches from June 1st to November 30th. However, in recent years there have been named storms forming in April, May, and even January. 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2023 all had named storms form before the official start of the hurricane season.
This market resolves YES if a tropical or subtropical storm forms before June 1st in the local time in the location where it forms. A storm in the part of the Atlantic in the southern hemisphere would count, but tropical activity there is exceedingly rare.
See also my El Nino / La Nina market for hurricane season: https://manifold.markets/SaviorofPlant/will-it-be-el-nino-la-nina-or-neith. El Niño tends to suppress Atlantic tropical cyclone activity, while La Niña tends to enhance it.
Related questions
Will resolve YES: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Atlantic_tropical_cyclone
"In the early hours of 19 February, the system intensified into a tropical storm, receiving the name Akará from the Brazilian Navy."
From the original description: "A storm in the part of the Atlantic in the southern hemisphere would count, but tropical activity there is exceedingly rare."
I added this line to the description mostly as a formality, not thinking it would actually be relevant, but a tropical storm formed in the SATL the day after I created this market, and nobody called it to my attention until @parhizj did today.
I think a lot of traders didn't read the description and assumed this market only included NATL storms. The SATL doesn't actually have a hurricane season, and if it did have one it would run from December to May, so the market title is very misleading. I'll leave the market open until the original close date to allow some people to pull their mana out, and I'm willing to compensate NO bettors as well (just ask).
@SaviorofPlant Yeah, I'll just managram NO bettors the payout they would have gotten from a NO resolution. This unfortunately could impact leagues for the people who put hundreds or thousands of mana into NO, but hopefully some of you can pull your mana out in time. Sorry everyone, this was my bad...
@SaviorofPlant Well this sucks. It does feel a bit misleading, but you were explicit about the southern Atlantic and that seems to be a real storm. I'd of course be happier with an N/A, but no need to feel like you should managram the difference.
@SaviorofPlant I think this would actually still resolve NO per the criteria? The storm formed before the market was created (though it became tropical a couple days after the market was created), and the market criteria was clearly future looking.
@Gabrielle Yeah, if the storm formed prior to the market, then later intensified, but this asks about "Will". Splitting hairs though and N/A seems reasonable. Also @SaviorofPlant , you might lock this market from future trading while you decide
@Gabrielle "I create a market thinking a thing has not happened and it turns out the thing happened before I created the market" is another case where I prefer N/A anyway (see: https://manifold.markets/SaviorofPlant/will-anthropic-google-or-facebook-r), so let's just go with that for this one as well.
@SaviorofPlant Not sure how N/A works at a technical level - would I have been better off not closing my “no” position?
The loss from trading here cost me the top spot in my league 😢
@BobSnodgrass Resolving to N/A reverts every trade in the market, so that it's like the trades never happened. As a result, you unfortunately lose your profit from the market.
I'm sorry to hear that it's costing you the top spot in the league. 😭 You still have time though!
@BobSnodgrass Forget next month, there's still the last 12 hours of today...
I assume the league profits you're referring to came from betting a market which was incorrectly at 10% to 90%, so I can't say I feel too bad about that considering if I handled this market correctly you wouldn't have had that opportunity in the first place
@SaviorofPlant i would have made the top spot with the value of my original "no" bets, which i sold and flipped after i saw your comment.
but don't feel bad at all - it's a game for fake internet points. ;)
Placed a YES limit order for the next ~12 hours at 1%:
ECMWF 12Z cyclone product predicts some type of disturbance (but this is not a tropical storm though) -- is this what YES holders are holding on to? FSU experimental ( https://moe.met.fsu.edu/modelgen/summary168al.php ) and NOAA's outlook https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/gtwo.php ) has nothing.
My own analysis has GFS 12Z (but not ECM 12Z) showing a possible TD developing there (but not becoming a short-lived tropical storm until after June starts -- for the last couple days I only have one NAV and one GFS run showing some type of disturbance developing, so I estimate it is still very low probability (<1% of this resolving YES, but the outside range is something like 0-8%.)
@parhizj May storms are often poorly modeled, so the chance might be higher than 1% - still very low though given there's just 3 days left
@parhizj I put my yes because apparently these two storms are not enough to be classified as subtropical storms? (South and north Atlantic respectively) They seem to meet the wind threshold. I must be missing some other important features.
That being said, I'm holding out on the 3 tropical waves at this point.
@Shifbru South Atlantic subtropical stuff is never classified, since it's such an inactive basin.
The North Atlantic system is over very low SSTs:
I believe there have been exceptions, but temperatures that low are usually not supportive of subtropical development and almost every low you find in that area is non-tropical.
@SaviorofPlant Thanks. Pedantic notes about resolution criteria for TC markets:
Something you might not be aware of is that different agencies have different pages depending on the quality of the information and pages also used for archives. Not all of these are updated regularly (some of them are staggered).
For instance, NHC https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/ home page is updated daily but their best tracks page ( https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/tcr/ ) can take months to update (for instance Hurricane Hilary (2023) in the Eastern Pacific took ~5 months after the storm for NHC's report to come out).
As per the page you listed for SATL it looks similar to the TCR page for NHC, and so I suspect that updates to it also are significantly delayed from when the storm actually took place.
In either case it is useful to specify specific pages if possible or what type of documents will be used for classification (best tracks/warnings/charts/etc).
@parhizj For NHC resolutions, I plan on using live advisory information, which I believe is updated at 6-hour or 3-hour intervals. I am less familiar with the Brazilian equivalent, but if anything forms there I will try and find the equivalent source of information on their site.
@SaviorofPlant, @SemioticRivalry Here are some relevant links on TS Akará (2024)
(Archived) Advisory:
Synoptic chart from then:
(INMET) Alert on facebook:
Some other non brazil information references I came across:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Atlantic_tropical_cyclone#Tropical_Storm_Akar%C3%A1
https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/news/rare-tropical-storm-akara-forms-brazilian-coast
Note: It was declared a TS the night of Feb 18. This question was created Feb 17 -- the timing was quite fateful.
@parhizj Why did you not share this earlier?
I would probably have erroneously resolved this NO if you didn't link this, so thank you. Feel free to make a YES bet if you want some compensation.
@parhizj I really bungled this market in retrospect - from the title, you'd assume it was only referring to NATL systems. Will probably managram NO bettors the mana they lost from this
@SaviorofPlant I did read the resolution details carefully before betting, but I failed to do the proper research until a couple days ago.
So, no, I don't think you are to blame at all. I do not believe it is the market creators responsibility to constantly research whether a market should resolve early (you are only required to do so at market close date or if a commenter pings you to do so ). Since, you are creating the question you should primarily expect others to get the market towards the correct probability.
Bettors betting it down long before I discovered this market created the impression that NO storms had already previously happened (my belief in the market having the correct % before betting also contributed to this blind spot, but I attribute my own laziness to be the largest factor.).
I would say this was a very good market actually: I learned about SATL basin and it reinforced the importance of not being lazy when doing basic research.