Market Policies

Market states

Every market has two independently toggleable states: Ranked and Unlisted. Admins and moderators can change either of these.

Ranked

All markets are ranked by default, meaning they count toward Leagues.

A market may be set to unranked if:

• It's unlisted — unlisted markets are always unranked, regardless of the toggle
• It's self-referential
• It's about the results of Leagues
• It resolves to something purely random or gambling-like (e.g. "will this coin flip be heads?")
• Resolution criteria can only be known by the creator or their immediate friends (e.g. "will I eat pizza tonight?") — unless the creator opts not to trade, provides no insider advantage to friends, and outlines concrete verifiable evidence at market creation
• It isn't predicting anything
• It can never be resolved or could only ever resolve one way

If you're not sure why your market is unranked, ask in Discord.

Markets that may be unlisted, N/A'd, or deleted

We default to unlisting — this makes a market only accessible via direct URL. Depending on severity, markets may be N/A'd or deleted instead.

The following may trigger action:

• Abandoned markets with vague criteria
• Sexually graphic content or significant violence
• Content that encourages or could directly facilitate terrorism, abuse, or violence
• Hateful content discriminating based on race, gender, sex, or disability — reviewed by admin on a case-by-case basis
• Titles containing trending spoilers
• Markets that resolve to something purely random or gambling-like
• Self-referential markets (e.g. "will this market get more upvotes than downvotes?")
• Low-quality non-predictive markets
• Markets designed to harvest or redistribute Manifold bonuses
• Markets designed to defraud users — these will typically be N/A'd retroactively rather than unlisted
• Markets that incentivize indiscriminate trading, commenting, or posting — including any pattern that creates significant server costs
• Content revealing or incentivizing leaking of users' private information (doxxing)
• Content that is illegal under US law or incentivizes criminal acts
• Sexual content involving minors
• Sexual exploitation, blackmail, or non-consensual intimate content
• Spam
• Media depicting self-harm or suicide
• Markets designed to exploit the Manifold codebase or abuse bugs
• Markets that incentivize violating another platform's terms of service

A note on third-party platforms

Copying Metaculus tournament questions while the community prediction is hidden violates their terms of service and undermines their tournaments. Don't do it. General questions inspired by external forecasting topics are fine — for example, "will Twitter have a data breach?" is allowed.

Personal markets

Personal goal markets are a use case we actively want to support.

Personal markets follow the same ranking rules as any other market. They are not automatically unranked — a well-run personal market that doesn't fall under the unranking criteria above should be ranked normally.

The exception is when the creator is participating in the market themselves, which creates an inherent insider advantage. In those cases the market will typically be unranked. This can be avoided if the creator opts not to trade, provides no insider advantage to others, and outlines concrete verifiable evidence at market creation.

Creators of personal markets have the right to resolve N/A at any time. We strongly encourage stating this upfront in your market description — something like "I reserve the right to resolve this N/A at any point" helps set expectations for traders.

A few other things to know:

• Some personal markets involve others or private matters that make clean resolution genuinely difficult. N/A is always available in those cases.
• Manifold can't force a creator to resolve a market if they leave the platform or go inactive.