01
Economics & Politics
We price macro releases, central bank decisions and elections, then argue about why the market disagrees with us.
Central banks · Elections · Macro releases
The ECB cuts before the Fed does0.34
Black Swan Student Society
A student association at Bocconi University in Milan, built around prediction markets and probabilistic thinking.
How membership worksThe name
Why Black Swan
The name comes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's 2007 book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Taleb, a former options trader, used the term for the rare events that decide outcomes and that everyone explains away afterwards.
That is what we work on. A prediction market forces you to put a number on the unlikely thing instead of ignoring it, and then holds you to that number when the question resolves.
Thesis01 / 03
A price is a probability
A prediction market turns a question into a price. When people with something at stake disagree about whether an event will happen, the price they settle on behaves as a probability, and it moves as evidence arrives.
We use that mechanism as a method. It forces a view into a number, which makes it testable, and it rewards calibration over conviction: a forecaster who says seventy per cent should be right seventy per cent of the time.
Nobody checks most analysis against what happened. Every forecast we publish carries a resolution date and a record of who was right.
Divisions02 / 03
Five divisions, one method
Each division owns a set of questions. The method underneath them does not change: state a probability, write the reasoning, take the score.
02
Business & Finance
We price corporate events, from earnings and guidance through to deals that may or may not close.
Earnings · Mergers · Listings
Tesla and SpaceX announce a merger by 20270.0903
Cross-Domain
We take the questions that refuse to sit inside one discipline, across crypto, private markets and whatever the week is actually arguing about.
Crypto · Private markets · Trending
Anthropic's IPO values it above $2tn0.4104
Academic Research
We study the markets themselves, publishing market reports and original research on what prediction markets reveal about the world.
Market reports · Open questions · Methodology
Prediction markets beat polling averages at the next election0.5805
Algorithm Development
We build what the other four divisions run on, from data pipelines through to the scoring that tells us how good we actually are.
Data pipelines · Backtesting · Calibration
Our model is better calibrated than the market0.28
Example markets are illustrative
Membership03 / 03
What members actually do
Membership is by application. We keep it small so that everyone reads everyone else's work, and there is no seniority in a forecast.
25+ members across five divisions
Weekly forecasts
Every member publishes a probability each week with the reasoning written underneath it.
Internal markets
Members trade the society's own markets against each other, which is where disagreement gets expensive.
Research notes
When a question deserves more than a number, the division writes it up and circulates it.
Competitions
We enter external forecasting competitions as a team and score ourselves against the field.
Applications
Applications open in September and February
We recruit twice a year. The form opens here when applications do.
Opens soon