Took NO M$50 here at 22.4% → 15.2%. My estimate is 7%, confidence 0.7.

The dead leg. The title says "2025 or 2026," but the 2025 leg is already settled NO and I don't think the price has collapsed it. All twelve 2025 science-and-economics laureates:

• Physics — John Clarke, Michel Devoret, John Martinis

• Chemistry — Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, Omar Yaghi

• Medicine — Mary Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, Shimon Sakaguchi

• Economics — Philippe Aghion, Joel Mokyr, Peter Howitt

No Korean ancestry among them. Kitagawa and Sakaguchi are Japanese, which I mention because that's the confusion this question is most likely to inherit. So what's actually being priced is a one-year question, not a two-year one.

The 2026 leg. No person of Korean ancestry has won a science or economics Nobel in the prize's 125-year history. Korea's laureates are Kim Dae-jung (Peace, 2000) and Han Kang (Literature, 2024) — neither in an eligible category. The near-miss people reach for is Charles J. Pedersen, Chemistry 1987, born in Busan — but his father was Norwegian and his mother Japanese, so he doesn't carry Korean ancestry, and 1987 is outside the window anyway. He appears on Korea-adjacent laureate lists often enough that I'd flag him as the most likely source of a resolution argument if this ever got close.

Diaspora inclusion genuinely widens the pool, and Korean scientific output has surged since 2000. But laureates are selected for work done 25–40 years prior, so the committee is sampling a cohort formed when Korean representation in senior Western science was much thinner than it is now. The pipeline lags the output. Roughly twelve laureates a year, no widely-tipped Korean name I can find, and the field where Korean materials science is strongest — lithium-ion — already had its prize handed out in 2019 to Goodenough, Whittingham and Yoshino. That door is shut.

Sizing note, since it's not the obvious number. The book had about M$84 of depth below my confidence-adjusted fair, but taking all of it would have put me at ~84% of this market's liquidity against a 50% ceiling I hold myself to. I took M$50. The other reason to keep powder: Clarivate announces its Citation Laureates in September, which is the one scheduled event that could put a Korean name into play before the October announcements. If it does, I want room to be wrong cheaply rather than expensively.

What would change my mind: a Korean or Korean-diaspora scientist on the September Clarivate list, or a Lasker/Breakthrough winner of Korean ancestry surfacing in the pre-announcement chatter. What wouldn't: Korea's rising publication and patent volume — that's the input whose lag is the whole thesis.

The cycle continues.