Polymarket Oil Scanner
Hourly geopolitical oil market intelligence powered by on-chain prediction market data.
An automated scanner that monitors 164+ live Polymarket markets covering oil prices, OPEC decisions, Strait of Hormuz traffic, Iran diplomacy, and Middle East conflict — and surfaces only the volume spikes and contrarian whale flows that matter for energy options traders. Runs every hour during market hours, delivers structured email and text alerts, stays silent when nothing meaningful fires.
Why Prediction Markets Lead Oil
Polymarket aggregates the dollar-weighted beliefs of informed participants into a continuously priced probability. For event-driven energy traders, that signal often moves before the wire.
Prediction markets price conviction, not opinion. When real USDC trades against a market, the price reflects what participants are willing to risk — not what they say. A volume spike means conviction is reorganizing, and the new price is the new consensus, settled in real money.
The oil book on Polymarket is unusually well-aligned to volatility. Hormuz disruption, Iran ceasefire, OPEC production decisions, and discrete WTI price targets all map directly onto front-month crude options gamma. A 5pp move in Hormuz probability is not a curiosity — it is a reweighting of the tail risk that crude vol is paying for.
A whale fading the crowd at $15,000 to $25,000 is a high-conviction print. Sophisticated capital almost never trades the consensus side at extremes — it hunts mispricings. When a single wallet stacks $20k+ against majority flow inside three hours, that is a position, not a flier, and it is being placed by someone who has already done the work.
News lags on-chain activity. The Polymarket order book updates the moment a Pentagon briefing leaks, an OPEC delegate is quoted on background, or a tanker is rerouted. Bloomberg headlines arrive minutes to hours later. The scanner exists to surface the print before the headline catches up.
What It Does
Three independent detection layers run on every hourly snapshot. Each layer has hard thresholds tuned to suppress noise from low-liquidity markets and routine retail flow.
Volume Spike Detection
- Scans 164+ active Polymarket markets tagged to oil, energy commodities, OPEC, Iran, Strait of Hormuz, Middle East conflicts, sanctions, and WTI / Brent price targets.
- Pairs each spike with the hour’s YES probability change in basis points so direction is unambiguous.
Whale Contrarian Alerts
- Scans only markets with genuine pricing uncertainty — YES probability between 4% and 96% — for outsized orders moving against consensus.
- “Crowd” is defined as the majority dollar flow direction across a time window of trade-level data.
- Flags when a single wallet places ≥ $5,000 USDC in a contrarian single trade AND ≥ $15,000 USDC total on the minority side within the 3-hour window.
- Reports pseudonym, wallet address, largest trade size, and exact UTC timestamps for every contrarian print so the position can be reconstructed end to end.
Automated Hourly Delivery
- Runs every hour from 6 AM to 8 PM CDT, the active US energy desk window covering Asia close, European session, and the full New York day.
- Delivers a structured HTML email with the full spike table and the complete whale timeline table.
- Delivers a compact text alert to mobile for desk-away coverage.
- Silent when nothing fires. Inboxes only receive alerts when the thresholds are met — no daily digest noise, no empty pings.
Markets Covered
The active universe is refreshed daily. Resolved markets are dropped automatically; new oil-tagged markets are added on roll. Below is a representative cross-section.
Sample Spike Alert
Representative output from a single hourly run. Each row is a market that cleared both the 3× volume multiple and the $25k USDC floor.
Sample Whale Alert
Same hour, same Hormuz market. The flagged whales are buying YES at sub-20% probability against a NO-dominant book.
Alert Format
Every run produces both an email and an text . The email is for the desk; the text is for everywhere else.
Structured HTML Digest
| Market | 1h Vol | 3h Avg | Mult | YES% | Δ | Narrative |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hormuz May 15 | $122.9k | $16.7k | 7.36× | 19.5% | −1.0 | Posture news |
| US invade Iran 2027 | $81.2k | $23.5k | 3.46× | 21.0% | +2.3 | Escalation |
Compact Mobile Alert
Methodology & Disclosure
- Data source. All inputs sourced from the public Polymarket Gamma API (market metadata) and Data API (trade-level prints), both on-chain and freely auditable.
- Volume computation. Last-hour USDC volume is computed as the cumulative volume delta between hourly snapshots — size × price summed per trade — not as raw API volume fields, to prevent double-count on cross-outcome flips.
- Detection windows. Spike detection uses a rolling 4-snapshot window for the trailing 3-hour average; whale detection paginates the trade-level endpoint over a 3-hour lookback per flagged market.
- Universe maintenance. The active market list is refreshed daily. Only active, non-resolved markets with genuine pricing uncertainty (YES probability between 4% and 96%) are eligible for whale detection.
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