RotoWire for Prediction Market Makers

What you'll learn: How prediction market makers — quant desks and trading funds pricing contracts on Kalshi, Polymarket, Betfair, and other exchanges — use RotoWire's projections, starting lineups, player news, and injuries to price player and team outcomes at true fair value, identify contracts the market is mispricing, and re-price ahead of the catalysts that move them.

Order-book data (OpticOdds) tells you where a contract is trading. RotoWire tells you what it's actually worth and what's about to change it. The distance between those two numbers is your edge.

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Why RotoWire for Prediction Markets?

Prediction market pricing rewards the informed side. A large share of exchange flow is casual and sentiment-driven — name recognition, recency, and slow reactions to real information. Contracts routinely trade away from fair value, most of all on player-level outcomes (props, milestones, awards) where the field has no underlying model. To capture that, you need two things a raw order book can't give you: an independent fair value to price against, and an early read on the catalysts that move it.

RotoWire is the industry's fundamentals feed — 250,000+ player news updates a year across 20+ leagues, trusted by leagues, pro teams, and major operators. One integration gives you:

• Projections — Full-season, rest-of-season, and daily/weekly projected means for every stat, plus per-DFS-site fantasy-point projections. A ready-made model to price any player or team contract.
• Priority-graded news — Every update carries a 1–5 severity grade, so you can route re-price and suspend logic off a number instead of parsing headlines.
• Injury status — Current, structured designations (Out, Day-To-Day, IL) with return dates — the availability truth for every flagged player.
• Starting lineups & starters — Projected and confirmed lineups, starting pitchers, goalies, and late scratches — the catalysts that move totals and props first.
• Supporting reads — Matchup ratings, weather, DFS ownership, value reports, and depth charts to sharpen and size your quotes.
• Breadth & normalization — One schema across 20+ leagues with stable player/team identifiers and cross-reference IDs for mapping to the rest of your stack.

You stop treating the market's price as truth and start trading against it when it's wrong. RotoWire is where your fair value and your catalysts come from; OpticOdds is where you see the crowd's price and route the trade.

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Your edge: fair value vs. the contract price

Prediction-market contracts settle at $1 / $0 and trade in probability space, so fair value maps straight to a price: a 62% fair probability = a fair contract price of 62¢. The entire game reduces to one comparison:

Fair value (from RotoWire) − contract price (on the exchange) = your edge.

If your model says "Player X 1+ home run" is worth 62¢ and Kalshi is offering YES at 55¢, you're a buyer — the field is underpricing it. If Polymarket is bid 70¢ off a hot streak your model doesn't support, you sell into it. Every input below feeds that one calculation.

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The four inputs — and how a desk trades each

1. Projections → your independent fair value

RotoWire's projections are the core of a prediction-market desk: projected means for every stat — season-long, rest-of-season, and daily/weekly — plus projected fantasy points per DFS site. Those means are the raw material you convert into contract fair values.

A real daily projection for one hitter:

Wilyer Abreu — PlateApp 4.32 · Hits 0.97 · HomeRuns 0.17 · TotalBases 1.70
               RBI 0.65 · StrikeOuts 1.01 · StolenBases 0.08
FantasyPts:  DraftKings 8.21 · FanDuel 10.92 · Yahoo 8.19

How a desk turns that into trades:

• Player-outcome contracts — convert the projected mean into a contract probability. A projected HomeRuns mean of 0.17 implies roughly a 15–16% chance of 1+ HR; if the exchange trades that YES at 10¢, you buy, at 25¢ you sell. TotalBases, StrikeOuts, and Hits means give you the fair line and fair price for those threshold/milestone contracts.
• Team & game outcomes — sum projected run/point contributions across a confirmed lineup to build a team or game total from the bottom up, then compare it to the exchange's contract.
• Fantasy-score contracts — price directly off the per-site FantasyPoints number.
• Season-long & futures — season and rest-of-season projections price player-season, award, and milestone contracts the same way.

This is the difference between making a market and chasing one: you carry an independent number and only trade when the crowd's price disagrees with it.

2. Starting lineups & starters → the catalysts the field is slow on

Your projections assume a lineup. When the real one is posted, fair value jumps — and casual flow is often slow to follow. RotoWire gives you both the projected and confirmed lineup, and the gap between them is a timing edge:

• MLB — the confirmed starting pitcher resets the game total and every hitter's contract. RotoWire also flags opener / bullpen games, which the field tends to price like a normal start (and gets wrong).
• NHL — a confirmed backup goalie (carried in the lineup) swings the moneyline and team-total contracts.
• NBA / soccer — a rested or benched star in a confirmed lineup collapses that player's prop contracts and reshapes the team total.

The trade: hold your projection-based fair values, and the moment a confirmed lineup diverges from the projection, re-price and act on the affected contracts before the field catches up.

3. News & Priority → act on the catalyst, fade the noise

Every RotoWire news item carries a Priority grade (1–5) — a two-sided edge:

• Priority 4–5 (a real catalyst) — ruled out, late scratch, trade, role change. Re-price and trade as the news lands, before it's fully reflected in the contract. (In practice Priority 5 is rare and reserved for the biggest events; Priority 4 is your day-to-day mover.)
• Priority 1–3 (color / low-impact) — the field often overreacts to a splashy but immaterial headline. When your model says the fundamentals haven't changed, fade the move — sell the pop, buy the dip.

Because the grade is structured, you route on the number, not the narrative — systematic, immediate, no headline parsing.

4. Injuries → the ripple the field underprices

The injury feed gives each flagged player's current status (Out, Day-To-Day, 7-Day IL, with return date and side). The obvious trade is the injured player's own contracts — but the larger edge is second-order: when a starter is ruled Out, his teammates' usage, projections, and contract fair values all move, and the field routinely underprices that ripple. Re-project the whole unit and trade the teammates before the market connects the dots.

Sharpening and sizing the trade

• Matchup ratings (1–5) — skew a player contract above or below the raw projection for the specific opponent.
• Weather (MLB/NFL) — wind and conditions to press or fade team-total and pitcher/passing contracts.
• Ownership & value reports — projected DFS ownership and over/undervalued-vs-salary reads are a proxy for where the public sits, so you can lean against crowded contracts.
• Depth charts — role/rank changes that reprice season-long and futures contracts before the field notices.

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Trading Patterns

Pattern 1 — Fair value vs. the book. Price every contract off RotoWire projections. Buy where the exchange trades below your fair value beyond your edge threshold; sell where it trades above. Size against the order-book depth from OpticOdds.

Pattern 2 — Trade the lineup catalyst. Diff projected vs. confirmed lineups and starters through the lock window. On a divergence — a scratch, a backup goalie, an opener — re-price and act on the affected contracts before the field reacts.

Pattern 3 — Act on news, fade the noise. On Priority 4–5, re-price as the catalyst lands. On Priority 1–3 overreactions your model doesn't support, fade the move.

Pattern 4 — The injury ripple. Trade the ruled-out player and the teammates whose usage just jumped — the second-order effect the field underprices.

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Combining RotoWire with OpticOdds

The two products are the two halves of a prediction-market desk:

The loop: price the contract with RotoWire projections → cross-check against Copilot's devigged consensus → compare to the exchange contract price and order book → trade the gap → let RotoWire's lineup, news, and injury catalysts drive every re-price. RotoWire tells you what it's worth and what's changing; OpticOdds shows you the field's price and lets you execute against it.

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The bottom line for a prediction-market desk

• Projections give you an independent fair value for every player and team contract — so you can tell when the market is wrong.
• Lineups & starters hand you the catalysts (pitchers, goalies, scratches, openers) the field is slow to price.
• News (Priority-graded) lets you act on real catalysts and fade the overreactions to noise.
• Injuries give you the second-order ripple the field underprices.

Carry your own number, trade it against the field, and let RotoWire's catalysts keep it current. That's RotoWire for prediction market makers.

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Glossary

Questions on feed access or coverage → your RotoWire and OpticOdds account teams.