What makes a set of markets a basket rather than a pile?

Two conditions. Every leg must resolve on the same date, because legs with different deadlines cannot express one view about one moment. And every leg must pay out in the same direction as the idea, because a leg that wins when tension rises is a hedge against your own thesis. The Iran board fails the first condition often: the Israel-Iran ceasefire contract in our index runs only to 31 August, so it cannot join a basket that settles on 30 September no matter how well it fits the story.

Can I skip the basket and just buy the cheapest leg?

You can, but you are buying a different trade. Hormuz reopening by 30 September at 6.5 cents is a lottery ticket on a shipping data series rather than on diplomacy: it resolves Yes only if IMF PortWatch publishes a seven-day moving average of transit calls at 60 or above. PortWatch counts only the ships it can see, so real traffic can recover while the contract still resolves No. That measurement error runs one way, always against the Yes side, and it is part of why the leg is cheap.

Why is the blockade five times more likely to end than the strait is to reopen?

Because they measure different things. The blockade market resolves on an official United States government announcement, and its text explicitly rejects leaks, unattributed statements, and partial exemptions. The Hormuz market resolves on a number: IMF PortWatch publishing a seven-day moving average of transit calls at 60 or above. A government can announce the end of a blockade in an afternoon. Minesweeping, war-risk insurance and rerouted fleets take months, so the shipping data lags the announcement by a long way.

What happens to this basket if the United States invades Iran?

Every leg goes to zero at once. The separate contract on a US invasion before 2027 trades at 12.5 cents on 62.3 million dollars of lifetime volume, which makes it the largest Iran market on the board by a wide margin, so traders treat a ground offensive as a real if unlikely tail. That contract is the clean way to express the opposite view. Holding the de-escalation basket is implicitly selling it, across four legs of cost rather than one.

When is a basket better than a single contract?

When the legs are genuinely different questions and you want exposure to a theme rather than to one event. The problem on the Iran board is that these four legs are not different questions: they are four measurements of the same ceasefire. A basket earns its complexity when losing one leg tells you little about the others. If a single event settles all of them together, you are paying four spreads to hold one position.

What is the real risk in holding all four legs?

Correlation. If the United States strikes Iranian soil in September, the ceasefire leg goes to zero and the blockade, talks and shipping legs go with it, because none of them survive a resumption of fighting. Four positions, one variable. The market quotes that variable directly at 83.5 cents, so the basket is close to a leveraged version of a bet you could place in a single contract, at a cost of 145 cents rather than 83.5.

ANALYSIS

Why the Iran de-escalation basket is one bet, not four

August 27, 2026 · 8 MIN READ

A de-escalation basket looks like diversification: ceasefire, blockade, talks, shipping. But every leg resolves off a different definition of peace, and all four die on the same event — which the market already quotes, on its own, at 83.5 cents.

Key takeaways

The four-leg September basket costs 145c to win a maximum of $4.00, a 176% return — but 57.6% of that cost sits in one leg that pays only a quarter of the prize.
Drop the ceasefire leg and the same idea costs 61.5c for a maximum $3.00: a 388% return from the three legs that still carry genuine uncertainty.
The blockade ending by 30 September trades at 32.5c while the strait reopening by the same date trades at 6.5c — a 26-point gap created entirely by their resolution texts.
The ceasefire market resolves No only on an air or missile strike hitting Iranian soil; naval gunfire, ground incursions and anything in Iran's airspace or waters are explicitly excluded.
A signed nuclear deal is priced at 2.15c against 22.5c for the two sides merely meeting — the market expects quiet, not reconciliation.

A de-escalation basket is the most natural-looking trade on the Iran board: buy the ceasefire holding, the blockade lifting, the talks happening and the shipping lanes reopening, and you have expressed one clear idea across four markets. It looks like diversification.

It is not. All four legs resolve off different definitions of peace, and all four die on the same event.

All figures below are from Oddzy's market data as of 27 August 2026. Prices move daily — check the market page before acting on any of them.

What is this basket actually buying?

Four contracts, every one of them resolving on or about 30 September 2026:

Leg	Buy	Price	Market volume
US–Iran ceasefire continues through 30 Sep	Yes	83.5c	$0.64M
US announces end of the Iranian blockade	Yes	32.5c	$1.93M
US–Iran diplomatic meeting occurs	Yes	22.5c	$0.57M
Hormuz traffic returns to normal	Yes	6.5c	$6.57M

Total cost: $1.45 · Maximum payout: $4.00 · Maximum return: 176%.

One honest note before anything else: at midpoints those four prices sum to exactly the cost, so the basket has no built-in edge. A basket is a way of shaping a view, not a way of manufacturing one. What follows is about the shape.

Why does the biggest leg carry the least information?

Split the basket by how settled each leg already is, and it stops looking like four positions.

The ceasefire leg alone is 57.6% of the cost and pays 25% of the maximum. At 83.5 cents you are lending the market most of a dollar to be told something the price has already told you. The other three legs cost 61.5 cents between them and pay up to $3.00.

Structure	Cost	Maximum	Return
All four legs	$1.45	$4.00	+176%
Three uncertain legs only	$0.615	$3.00	+388%

Same idea, same direction, same date. The four-leg version buys a near-certainty at a poor rate and dilutes the return by more than half.

The rule underneath this: in any basket, only the unresolved legs carry information. Everything above roughly 80 cents is parked money, and you should decide deliberately whether you want to park it. Baskets are not parlays — the legs pay independently, which is exactly why a dead leg is dead weight rather than a multiplier.

Are you betting on direction, or on speed?

This is where most readers misjudge the trade. Look at the same two questions across every deadline our index carries:

US announces end of the Iranian blockade:

31 Aug	7 Sep	14 Sep	21 Sep	30 Sep	31 Oct	31 Dec
3.55c	11.5c	20.5c	23.5c	32.5c	50.5c	78.35c

Hormuz traffic returns to normal:

31 Aug	15 Sep	30 Sep	31 Oct	30 Nov	31 Dec
0.35c	1.75c	6.5c	14.5c	23.5c	33.5c

By year end the market gives the blockade announcement a 78.35% chance. The direction is not in dispute — it is close to consensus. What the September contract prices is when.

So this basket is not a bet that tension falls. It is a bet that it falls faster than the market expects. That is the sentence to settle with yourself before buying anything, and it is a much harder claim than the one the basket appears to make.

The ceasefire ladder runs the other way, and that is the tell:

31 Aug	15 Sep	30 Sep
96.3c	89.5c	83.5c

A ceasefire contract decays as the window lengthens, because a longer window is more time for it to break. The market is pricing a 12.8% chance the United States strikes Iranian soil during September — in the same month it gives a 29-point chance the blockade is announced over. De-escalation and re-escalation are priced side by side, in the same basket.

Why is the blockade five times likelier to end than the strait is to reopen?

32.5c against 6.5c, same date, both meaning "the sea lanes open again". A 26-point gap. The answer is in the resolution texts, not the politics.

The blockade market resolves on an official US government announcement. Its text rejects "anonymous, unattributed, or leaked statements", statements by people not authorised to speak for the government, and any "limited or partial change that stops short of a general end".
The Hormuz market resolves on a number: IMF PortWatch publishing a seven-day moving average of transit calls at 60 or above, any single day before the deadline.

An announcement takes an afternoon. Minesweeping, war-risk insurance returning and rerouted fleets coming back take months. The gap is not an inconsistency — it is the market correctly pricing the distance between a policy and a shipping recovery. We covered the PortWatch mechanics in detail in what the Hormuz markets are actually pricing.

Note also that the gap widens with time: by 31 December the announcement is at 78.35c and the shipping recovery at 33.5c, 45 points apart. The market expects the blockade called off and the strait still not normal.

Does the ceasefire leg mean the war is over?

Not the way the label reads, and this is the most under-priced detail on the board.

The ceasefire market resolves No only if the United States lands an air strike or a surface-to-surface missile strike that directly impacts Iran. Its own text excludes, explicitly:

naval gunfire and artillery, howitzers and rocket artillery
ground incursions
cyber operations and small-arms fire
munitions intercepted before impact
any threat, authorisation or announcement of force that has not been executed

And it defines "Iran" as terrestrial territory and internal waters — Iran's airspace and maritime territory are not encompassed.

Read those together and the consequence is sharp: the United States could enforce a naval blockade with naval gunfire against Iranian shipping in Iranian maritime territory, and this contract still resolves Yes. The 83.5-cent leg is not "the war stays over". It is "nothing falls out of the sky onto Iranian soil". That is a real thing to trade — it is just not the thing the basket's story is about. This is the whole reason to read the resolution rules before the price.

Why do two markets on the same meeting disagree by 13.6 cents?

The standalone binary on a US–Iran diplomatic meeting by 30 September trades at 22.5c.

A separate contract for no qualifying meeting by the same date trades at 63.9c — which implies 36.1% that a meeting happens. Two prices for one event, 13.6 points apart.

The explanation is structural. The 63.9c contract is not a binary at all: it is the "none" bucket of a categorical market on which country hosts the next round. Closing that gap means simultaneously trading every venue bucket, and our index carries only three of them. Gaps like this survive because the arbitrage is operationally awkward, not because nobody has noticed.

Worth knowing why the meeting price is low at all: talks have not stopped. The market's text notes the first round concluded in Switzerland on 22 June, and then rules that follow-on technical talks from that round do not qualify by themselves. The contract needs a fresh senior-level round, not the continuation of the existing one.

What I dropped from this basket, and why

Three legs that suggest themselves do not survive contact with the data.

Oil at $70 — dropped. The September WTI-to-$70 contract has $502 of lifetime volume and $306 in the last 24 hours. It is not tradeable in any meaningful size, and it is not indexable on Oddzy for that reason. Conceptually it is worse: oil is a consequence of de-escalation, not a measure of it, and OPEC and demand move it too. The tell is that WTI reaching $90 in September trades at 45.5c — the escalation side of oil is far more actively priced than the calm side.

"No diplomatic meeting occurs" — reversed. This leg wins when tension persists. In a de-escalation basket it is a bet against your own thesis. Buy the meeting at 22.5c instead — cheapest and most informative leg on the board.

Nuclear deal resolving No at 97.85c — dropped. You pay 97.85 cents to win a dollar: a 2.2% maximum return. Add it and the basket's cost goes from 145c to 242.85c while the maximum goes from $4.00 to $5.00 — cutting the maximum return from 176% to 106%. One leg, 40% of the capital, 20% of the prize.

That last number is also the article's thesis in miniature. A signed deal by 30 September is priced at 2.15c while the two sides simply sitting down is priced at 22.5c — better than ten to one against reconciliation, given a meeting. The market is buying quiet. It is not buying peace.

The one variable underneath all four legs

Every leg in this basket is downstream of the same question: does the United States strike Iran again in the next month?

If it does, the ceasefire leg goes to zero, and the blockade announcement, the diplomatic meeting and the shipping recovery go with it. Four positions, one event. The market quotes that event on its own at 83.5 cents. Buying the basket at 145 cents is, to a first approximation, a leveraged and more expensive way of expressing it.

That is not a reason to avoid the trade. It is a reason to size it as one position rather than four, and to stop thinking of the four legs as risk that has been spread.

Two more practical notes. The uncertain legs are thin: the meeting market has moved $51,828 in 24 hours and the September blockade contract $90,300, so total volume is not depth. And every price quoted here is a midpoint — you will cross a spread on each of four legs, which is how a fill ends up worse than the screen.

Before you buy any basket

Do all the legs share one settlement date?
Does every leg pay in the same direction as the idea?
Which legs are already resolved — above 80c or below 20c — and do you want to park capital there?
What is the return on the uncertain legs alone?
Read the date ladder: are you betting on direction, or on speed?
Read all the resolution texts. Do the legs measure the same kind of event, or an announcement against a data series?
What single event kills every leg at once, and what does the market charge for that event by itself?

This is market-price analysis, not financial advice and not a political position. Prediction markets carry the risk of losing your entire stake.

Common questions

What makes a set of markets a basket rather than a pile?: Two conditions. Every leg must resolve on the same date, because legs with different deadlines cannot express one view about one moment. And every leg must pay out in the same direction as the idea, because a leg that wins when tension rises is a hedge against your own thesis. The Iran board fails the first condition often: the Israel-Iran ceasefire contract in our index runs only to 31 August, so it cannot join a basket that settles on 30 September no matter how well it fits the story.
Can I skip the basket and just buy the cheapest leg?: You can, but you are buying a different trade. Hormuz reopening by 30 September at 6.5 cents is a lottery ticket on a shipping data series rather than on diplomacy: it resolves Yes only if IMF PortWatch publishes a seven-day moving average of transit calls at 60 or above. PortWatch counts only the ships it can see, so real traffic can recover while the contract still resolves No. That measurement error runs one way, always against the Yes side, and it is part of why the leg is cheap.
Why is the blockade five times more likely to end than the strait is to reopen?: Because they measure different things. The blockade market resolves on an official United States government announcement, and its text explicitly rejects leaks, unattributed statements, and partial exemptions. The Hormuz market resolves on a number: IMF PortWatch publishing a seven-day moving average of transit calls at 60 or above. A government can announce the end of a blockade in an afternoon. Minesweeping, war-risk insurance and rerouted fleets take months, so the shipping data lags the announcement by a long way.
What happens to this basket if the United States invades Iran?: Every leg goes to zero at once. The separate contract on a US invasion before 2027 trades at 12.5 cents on 62.3 million dollars of lifetime volume, which makes it the largest Iran market on the board by a wide margin, so traders treat a ground offensive as a real if unlikely tail. That contract is the clean way to express the opposite view. Holding the de-escalation basket is implicitly selling it, across four legs of cost rather than one.
When is a basket better than a single contract?: When the legs are genuinely different questions and you want exposure to a theme rather than to one event. The problem on the Iran board is that these four legs are not different questions: they are four measurements of the same ceasefire. A basket earns its complexity when losing one leg tells you little about the others. If a single event settles all of them together, you are paying four spreads to hold one position.
What is the real risk in holding all four legs?: Correlation. If the United States strikes Iranian soil in September, the ceasefire leg goes to zero and the blockade, talks and shipping legs go with it, because none of them survive a resumption of fighting. Four positions, one variable. The market quotes that variable directly at 83.5 cents, so the basket is close to a leveraged version of a bet you could place in a single contract, at a cost of 145 cents rather than 83.5.