Prediction Markets Beat the Weather Forecast on Tomorrow's High Temperature

Alexander W. Crosier

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: The sooner we receive information, and the more accurate it is, the better planning decisions we can make. Every day, prediction markets let anyone bet on tomorrow's high temperature in cities around the world, creating a market-implied forecast built on dispersed information. We use the past five years of market data from the Kalshi exchange for seven American cities to extract, hour by hour, the market-implied forecast. We use this forecast as a measuring instrument to see how much information about the temperature the market makes public before the public forecasting system does. We race it against the leading American and European weather forecasts. In six of the seven cities we study, the market beats the most accurate single public forecast, the National Blend of Models (NBM). Aggregating every city-day, at the end of the market's first hour of trading it beats the best single public product by about 10 percent in root-mean-square error, and holds its lead through the day, overnight, and into the target day. Looking at how the forecasts move over time, we find the National Blend travels four times further toward the market between its postings than the market travels toward the NBM. The market does not react to new weather forecast updates; instead, the forecast slowly publishes information that the market had already shared publicly.

Date: 2026-09
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