Report date 2026-06-22 · Horizon 45 days (markets closing on/before 2026-08-06) · Capital $1,000 · Methodology v3 (conviction-weighted, EV-agnostic, 15% cluster cap, entry-band screen)
0 picks · 10 logged rejects · $1,000 held in cash
The Elections category inside a 45-day window is, this week, a textbook efficient-and-illiquid book. After pulling every active market, reading the rules, checking 14-day price history and live order books, and grounding probabilities in primary news, no contract clears the v3 screens. The markets split cleanly into three buckets, none deployable:
Per the v3 rule that cash is a position and a near-empty book in an efficient week is the correct answer — not a failure — I am deploying nothing and holding the full $1,000. Padding the book with a thin-edge deep favorite or a regime-change coin-flip on auto-copy real money is exactly what the resolved track record punished.
Selection mode: category-match. $CATEGORY="Elections" matched trading_events.category directly and returned 22 active markets closing within 45 days — comfortably enough that no theme/keyword fallback was needed.
/schema first; confirmed trading_events (category), trading_markets (rules/close), market_snapshots (5-min price/volume history).volume24h<1500, bid-ask spread >5¢, "fully priced" books (YES bid ≥95¢ or YES ask ≤5¢), announcer-noise, and the 2 Elections tickers already in active published picks (KXMILLSPLATNER-26NOV03-JUL01, KXPLATNERDROPOUT-26).market_snapshots row (2026-06-22 12:00Z).Markets in category/horizon: 22 Survived Stage 1 cleanly: ~0 Diligenced: 10 Final picks: 0
The full Elections slate within the horizon. "Effective entry" is the price you'd pay for the side a buyer would naturally take. Every row is a reject — reasons in §4.
| Ticker | Market | YES bid/ask | Vol 24h | OI | Lean | Disposition |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| KXTRUMPOUT27…AUG01 | Trump leaves office before Aug 1 | 2 / 3 | 13,216 | 2.17M | NO | PASS · priced |
| KXDIAZOUT-MDC…AUG01 | Díaz-Canel leaves office before Aug 1 | 22 / 25 | 298 | 12,202 | NO? | REJECT · live crisis |
| KXDIAZOUT-MDC…JUL01 | Díaz-Canel leaves office before Jul 1 | 4 / 5 | 1,074 | 86,238 | NO | PASS · priced/thin |
| KXELECTIRAN…JUL01 | Iran holds presidential election before Jul 1 | 0 / 3 | 307 | 31,284 | NO | PASS · priced/thin |
| KXLAIOUT-LCHI…JUL01 | Lai Ching-te leaves office before Jul 1 | 0 / 4 | 0 | 1,806 | NO | REJECT · illiquid |
| KXFETTERMANSWITCH…AUG01 | Fetterman leaves Democratic party before Aug 1 | 0 / 6 | 0 | 8,419 | NO | REJECT · illiquid |
| KXFETTERMANSWITCH…JUL01 | Fetterman leaves Democratic party before Jul 1 | 0 / 1 | 0 | 6,400 | NO | REJECT · illiquid/priced |
| KXMILLSPLATNER…AUG01 | Mills endorses Platner before Aug 1 | 9 / 16 | 0 | 2,255 | NO | REJECT · spread/cluster |
| KXMILLSPLATNER…JUN29 | Mills endorses Platner before Jun 29 | 1 / 3 | 0 | 2,997 | NO | REJECT · illiquid |
| KXPRATTCONCEDE…JUL01 | Spencer Pratt concedes LA mayoral primary | 16 / 22 | 539 | 4,367 | NO | REJECT · spread/ambig |
| KXAPCALLLAMAYOR…JUN30 | AP calls 2026 LA mayoral primary by Jun 30 | ~0 / ~100 | 1,010 | 2,010 | — | REJECT · priced/illiquid |
| KXGENERICBALLOT…T5.2 | Generic ballot above 5.2% (Jun 26) | 55 / 58 | 125 | 304 | — | REJECT · coin-flip/illiquid |
| KXTRUMPNUMSTATES…E1–E8 | Distinct US states Trump visits in June (ladder) | 0–55 | ≤199 | 50–675 | — | REJECT · illiquid ladder |
No picks this run. Every Stage-2 candidate failed either the liquidity filter, the "edge ≤ slippage/fees" test on deep favorites, or the "price already moved / can't out-forecast a live situation" reject gate. The detailed reasoning for each is in §4 — in a zero-pick run the rejects are the report.
The two markets that came closest to a pick, and why each failed, are worth reading as the core finding:
On the surface this screamed value: Díaz-Canel was re-elected to a second five-year term by Cuba's National Assembly and told NBC's Meet the Press on April 10, 2026 that "stepping down is not part of our vocabulary." A re-elected autocrat leaving office in six weeks looks like a ~95%+ NO — so NO at 78¢ looks like +17¢ of free edge. It is a trap. There is an active 2026 Cuban crisis: a fuel/economic collapse, protests across Havana, Artemisa, Holguín and Santiago on June 2–3, fresh US sanctions on Díaz-Canel (June 5), and an explicit Trump-administration regime-change campaign targeting Cuba "by end of 2026." The 22¢ YES is informed pricing of a live ouster scenario, not stale noise — and the price has whipsawed 3¢ ↔ 39¢ repeatedly over the last two weeks (it re-spiked to 28–36¢ on June 18–20). I have no edge over a fast-moving headline market, and 24h volume (298) fails the liquidity floor anyway. Reject.
The only Elections market with real depth (OI 2.17M, 24h volume 13,216, 0.6¢ spread). But NO sits at 97.1–97.7¢ and has been rock-stable at 2–3¢ YES for the entire 14-day window. My estimate for Trump leaving office (death/removal/resignation) before Aug 1 is ~1.5–2%, so true NO ≈ 98% vs buying at 97.7 — an edge of roughly +1¢, inside the fee/slippage band. Risking 97.7¢ to make 2.3¢ is poor risk/reward, and the rules' death clause resolves at last traded price rather than YES, capping even the tail's payoff. Efficiently priced. Reject.
Allocation: $0 deployed · $1,000 (100%) cash. There is nothing to size, so the cluster and conviction tables are reported empty — by design, this is the auditable evidence that the screens cleared the book rather than the screens being skipped.
| Line | Contracts | Cost | Max payout | EV $ | % of capital |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| (no positions) | 0 | $0 | $0 | $0 | 0% |
| Cash reserve | — | $1,000 | $1,000 | — | 100% |
| Total deployed | 0 | $0 | $0 | $0 | 0% |
| Cluster | Cost | % capital | vs 15% cap |
|---|---|---|---|
| — (none deployed) | $0 | 0% | OK |
| Tier | Cost deployed | % capital |
|---|---|---|
| HIGH | $0 | 0% |
| MEDIUM | $0 | 0% |
| LOW | $0 | 0% |
All 10 diligenced candidates below are machine-logged and shadow-tracked to settlement. If the rejects collectively perform as well as a real pick book would have, that itself is a finding about whether the Elections screen adds value this week. Cuts made specifically by the Stage-3.5 entry-band screen (coin-flips and the ladder) are flagged.
Would-be side NO @ ~0.78. Reject: active 2026 Cuban crisis (protests June 2–3, US sanctions June 5, explicit Trump regime-change push) means the 22¢ YES is informed, not stale; price whipsawed 3¢↔39¢ over two weeks. No edge over a fast-moving headline market, and 24h volume 298 < 1,500.
Would-be side NO @ ~0.977. Reject: efficiently-priced deep favorite. NO 97.1–97.7¢ vs true ~98% — edge ≈ +1¢, below slippage/fees. Risking 97.7¢ to make 2.3¢ is poor risk/reward; the death clause caps even the tail. >90¢ band, thin by construction.
Would-be side NO @ ~0.95. Reject: deep NO favorite at 95–96¢, edge ≈ +1–3¢ for him surviving 9 more days; rides the same diaz-canel-out cluster as the headline-risk Aug rung; vol24h 1,074 < 1,500.
Would-be side NO @ ~0.97. Reject: Pezeshkian was elected July 2024; the next regular presidential vote is ~2028. No election before Jul 1, 2026. NO already 97–99¢ (no edge room) and vol24h 307 < 1,500.
Would-be side NO @ ~0.96. Reject: Taiwan's president, no transition path in 9 days. NO already ~96–99¢ (no edge room); vol24h 0 and a wide YES 0.1–4¢ / NO 96–99.9¢ market — unfillable.
Would-be side NO @ ~0.94. Reject: Fetterman has repeatedly said he is staying a Democrat. NO already ~94¢+ (no edge room); vol24h 0 and a 0–6¢ YES market — illiquid, unfillable.
Would-be side NO @ ~0.84. Reject: vol24h 0 and a 7¢ bid-ask spread (>5¢ filter). Also rides the mills-platner-endorse thesis already covered by active published picks (JUL01 NO, PLATNERDROPOUT NO) — deploying here would compound a correlated, already-live cluster.
Would-be side NO @ ~0.82. Reject: novelty market; vol24h 539 < 1,500 and a 6¢ spread (>5¢ filter). "Concede" is ill-defined — a primary candidate has no obligation to formally concede — so resolution carries definitional ambiguity risk on top of illiquidity.
Would-be side YES @ ~0.58. Reject (Stage 3.5): coin-flip band (~55–59¢) with no high-conviction edge — fails the entry-band screen outright. Compounded by vol24h 125 and OI 304, it is effectively untradeable.
Would-be side YES on the modal leg (E6 @ ~0.51). Reject (Stage 3.5 + liquidity): mutually-exclusive ladder with negligible liquidity (per-leg OI 50–675, vol24h ≤199). The modal legs sit in the coin-flip band with no defensible count edge, and the whole set is unfillable. Checked the leg-sum for a structural arb — none worth the spread.
trading_events, trading_markets (rules/close), market_snapshots (14-day price/volume history)Data sources: Kalshi live mirror DB (categories, rules, 5-min snapshots) + Kalshi public API (live order books) + web search for primary-source news, as of 2026-06-22.
Disclaimer: Probabilities here are subjective estimates, not guarantees. Prediction-market contracts resolve to $1 or $0 — a losing position goes to zero. This is research and methodology documentation, not financial advice. Methodology v3: position size is gated by conviction tier and entry band, never by EV; edge_cents/ev_pct are recorded for calibration only because the resolved track record showed stated EV to be anti-predictive. This run deployed no capital.