What we don’t list.

Most of what makes a prediction market worth trusting is not what it lists. It is what it refuses to list, and whether that refusal is written down somewhere a person can hold it to.

So here are four kinds of question NdioLa will not make a market on, each with the reason it is excluded. The reasoning is the part that matters. A list can be quietly revised; an argument has to be argued with.

Why a fixture is not a bet

NdioLa lists markets on sporting fixtures. It is not a sportsbook, and the difference is structural rather than a matter of wording.

A bookmaker forms a view, sets odds around it, and takes the other side of every wager. Its margin is priced in, its interest runs against its customers’, and the price struck at the counter is the only price that will ever apply.

NdioLa sets no odds. Prices move in response to what people trade, under a published automated market maker, and nobody at NdioLa forms a view on any outcome. Revenue is a disclosed spread on each trade plus a fee on net winnings — neither depends on how a market settles. A share pays KSh 10 if the outcome it names occurs, fixed when the market opens and never adjusted afterwards. And a position can be sold back at the prevailing price at any time before close, which is not something a bet permits.

The same rule prices every market on the board. A league fixture is priced identically to an inflation print, because it is the identical instrument.

1. Nothing without a single named published source

A question is listed only if it passes three tests: a named, publicly checkable source will publish the answer; that source publishes on or before a date that can be written down; and the question has exactly one Ndio reading and one La reading. Every market on the board names its source on the card, before you open it.

The reason is that settlement has to be something you can check rather than something we assert. If NdioLa is the only party able to say how a market resolved, the answer is our opinion, and a market settled by opinion is not infrastructure — it is a promise. Settles from the Central Bank of Kenya daily indicative exchange rate for 31 August 2026 can be checked by anyone who disagrees with us. Settles on the general consensus cannot.

This rules out more than it first appears to: anything whose answer is a matter of interpretation, anything where two credible sources could disagree and no rule decides between them, and anything settled by a private communication rather than a publication.

2. Nothing whose outcome a participant could influence

If holding a position gives someone both a reason and a means to change the answer, the question is not listed. That covers outcomes decided by a group small enough that a participant could be in it, outcomes turning on one identifiable person’s decision, and anything where money on one side is itself an argument for that side.

A prediction market works because the price aggregates what people believe will happen. The moment a price can pay someone to make it happen, it stops being a forecast and becomes an incentive. That is not a problem trading volume fixes, and it is not a problem rules about who may trade fix either. It is fixed by not listing the question.

3. Nothing about the private lives of individuals

No relationships, no health, no family circumstances, no personal finances, and no questions about people who are not public figures acting in a public capacity.

A public official’s decision in office is a legitimate public question — whether a cabinet reshuffle happens, whether an election date is gazetted. What the same person does at home is not, and a question being answerable has never been the same thing as a question being listable. Nobody should find out that strangers hold a position on their private life.

The line is the role, not the fame. A well-known person acting privately is out. An official nobody has heard of, acting in office, is in.

4. Nothing concerning death, injury or violence against a named person

No question on whether a named person will die, be harmed, be attacked or be the target of violence. This holds however public the person is, however widely the question is already being discussed elsewhere, and however cleanly a published source would settle it.

This is the one exclusion that needs no market-design argument. Listing such a question would create a standing financial interest in harm coming to a specific human being. There is no volume, no wording and no settlement source that makes that acceptable.

What this leaves

Public questions with published answers: rate decisions, inflation prints, election dates and results, trade and growth figures, launch schedules, policy and treaty milestones, weather seasons measured by a meteorological service, and the results of professional sporting fixtures as published by the competition organiser. The twenty-four markets on the board are the whole of what NdioLa currently lists, and each of them names the source that settles it.

If you think a listed market breaks this

Tell us. Email legal@ndiola.com naming the market and which of the four it fails, and you will get a written answer. A market that should not have been listed is a material error in the writing of that market, which is one of the conditions under which a market is voided: every share is refunded in full, with no spread and no fee retained. See Deposits, payouts and refunds.

How a market runs from opening to payout is on How it works.