Resolution source
Also called resolution criteria · settlement source
The specific document, feed, or authority a market's rules name as the thing that decides its outcome.
Two markets can describe the same event in identical plain English and still resolve differently, because the rules text points at different authorities. The resolution source is that pointer, and reading it is the cheapest edge available to anyone willing to spend two minutes.
Kalshi names one per series in its rules. The daily-temperature series settle against a named climate report for a specific weather station, not a city — which is why the Weather Edge tool forecasts the station coordinates rather than the city center. For a coastal pair like downtown San Francisco and the airport the two disagree by enough degrees to flip which temperature bucket wins, so forecasting the settlement point is the entire model.
The cross-venue case is where it bites hardest. The arbitrage scanner carries a curated pair for the World Cup top scorer and marks it explicitly as not a lock, because Kalshi's wording about leading in goals can resolve YES for every tied leader while Polymarket breaks a tie down to a single winner. Part of the visible price gap between those two markets is tie handling, not disagreement about football. Pairs like that are shown as price signals with the caveat attached and never rendered as a locked spread.
Where this shows up
Related terms
Definitions describe how Polymarket and Kalshi behave and how WhaleTracks models them; venue rules and fee schedules can change, so confirm anything you size a position on with the venue itself. WhaleTracks is informational analytics, not financial advice. Past performance does not guarantee future results.