Price ladders

A ladder is a set of markets on the same asset at rising price levels:

Does BTC touch $90,000 / $95,000 / $100,000 at any point before October 1?

They share one page (BTC price levels) so you can read them together, but they are independent markets. Each rung has its own book, its own volume, its own settlement and its own page: you can trade one rung and ignore the rest.

The rungs nest

Touching $100,000 means having touched $95,000, which means having touched $90,000. So the chance of each rung is at least the chance of every rung above it.

• The chances do not add to 100%, and are not supposed to. A five-rung ladder routinely sums past 200%. That is not a pricing error and not an arbitrage.
• Holding two rungs at once is ordinary, not a hedge and not a contradiction: a ladder is a series of thresholds, not a set of alternatives.

How a ladder is drawn

Each rung’s chance is printed and drawn as a bar, in a neutral colour. There is never a share of a normalised 100%, a “leading outcome”, green/red leader colouring, or wording implying that exactly one rung pays.

Kinds of level

The market page says which kind a ladder is:

• Touch: does the asset reach this level at any point before the date? Once touched, it stays touched.
• Above: is the asset above this level on the date? Only the value at settlement matters.
• By date (Polymarket): the same question at several deadlines (ceasefire holds through September 30 / October 31). A yes by an earlier deadline means a yes by every later one.

All of them nest, and none is a partition.

A level that has closed stays on the ladder with its result (Reached, or Yes / No on Polymarket) and can no longer be traded.

Where the levels come from

The rungs, the wording and the resolution rule are the deployer’s. Read the market’s rules for the exact strike and cutoff.