polyAether
The textbook

Understand polyAether from zero.

This is a short course, not a sales pitch. It explains — in plain language, from the ground up — what polyAether does and why it might work. You do not need any background in finance, trading, or weather. Every idea is built up one step at a time, and every term is defined the first time it's used.

10 short chapters No prerequisites Honest about the risks

If you've ever checked a weather app and thought "there's no way it's that uncertain," you already have the core intuition behind this whole project. polyAether is an automated system that places small bets on tomorrow's high temperature in a handful of cities — and its entire edge comes from the fact that the crowd tends to treat the weather as more uncertain than it really is.

That one sentence has a lot packed into it: what a "bet on temperature" even means, where you place it, how weather can be predictable enough to bet on, and why being right about the odds matters more than being right about any single day. We'll unpack all of it, slowly, in order.

The plan for this book

Chapters 1–5 build your intuition: what polyAether is, how prediction markets work, why weather is forecastable, and the single insight the whole strategy rests on. Chapters 6–10 get concrete: turning a forecast into an actual bet, the surprisingly hard problem of how a market "settles," how we avoid ruin, how the machine runs minute to minute, and an honest accounting of what could go wrong.

Read it straight through, or jump to whatever you're curious about — each chapter stands on its own but assumes you've met the ideas before it. Let's start.

Contents — 10 chapters

Start at zero, finish knowing how it works.

  1. 01 What is polyAether?The whole idea in one plain-English picture — a small bet on tomorrow's temperature, made carefully.
  2. 02 Prediction markets, from scratchWhat it means to buy a contract that pays $1 if something happens — and how its price is really a probability.
  3. 03 Why weather is predictable — but never certainHow modern forecasts work, why they run dozens of simulations at once, and why some doubt always remains.
  4. 04 Probability, calibration, and edgeWhat it means to be "well-calibrated," and how a better sense of the odds turns into a real advantage.
  5. 05 The core insight: the crowd overpays for surprisesWhy these markets price the weather as ~1.3× more uncertain than it is — and how that gap becomes our opening.
  6. 06 From a forecast to a betThe step-by-step path from a ~122-member ensemble forecast to deciding which temperature band to actually buy.
  7. 07 The hidden hard part: how a market settlesWhich exact station, which rounding rule, which local day — the unglamorous detail that quietly decides who wins.
  8. 08 Not losing money: sizing and riskFractional Kelly sizing, per-market and daily caps, a correlation limit, and a kill switch — how no single day can sink us.
  9. 09 How the machine actually runsThe loop that scans every 5 minutes across ~80 curated stations, reads the order book, and decides in a fraction of a second.
  10. 10 Honesty, risks, and a glossaryWhere the strategy could fail, why there's no track record yet, and every term in one place to look up.
One thing to keep in mind

polyAether is in a pre-live validation phase — it runs on paper only, with no real money at risk and no proven track record. This book explains how it is designed to work, not a result it has achieved. It is educational and explanatory only, and is not financial advice.

Ready? Begin with Chapter 1 — What is polyAether?