Nobel Peace Prize Odds: The 2025 Market Rose 66 Points Before the Announcement

The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize market moved further before its announcement than any other award in the data. In the 12 hours before the Norwegian Nobel Committee named María Corina Machado on 10 October 2025, her Polymarket price rose 65.8 points, from 1.5% to 67.3%. Across 50 committee-decided award announcements between January 2025 and April 2026, the median winner moved 0.35 points in the same window, and one other moved more than 20.

For 2026, Polymarket's favourite at 19:00 UTC on 29 September 2026 was Sudan's Emergency Response Rooms at 16.4%. The prize is announced at 09:00 UTC on 9 October, and the winner's price will be measured the same way.

The measurement is a timing statistic: how far a price travelled before a scheduled announcement, set against that market's own quiet period. It says nothing about who traded or why.

The favourite's price was more than twice that of the next candidate, Save the Children. A year earlier the favourite a day out was the same organisation, Sudan's Emergency Response Rooms, at 27%, and it did not win; Machado traded at 0.85%.

Vultax records the 2026 market the same way as the 2025 one. The forecast record stores the full Polymarket market 7 days, 24 hours, 1 hour and 10 minutes before the announcement, and the book capture has read 18 of the 32 listed outcomes every minute since 17:49 UTC on 16 September. The winner's 12-hour move will be measured against its own 30 days, ranked against the 50 awards below and added to this page.

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Polymarket's own price history reproduces the widely quoted figures exactly: 3.75% at 21:29 UTC on 9 October and 72.8% at 00:00 UTC on 10 October. The move began with a $14,250 fill at 5.0% at 22:42 UTC on 9 October; from the next minute the price never again printed below 5%.

In the first hour of the move 215 fills worth $74,194 came from 71 taker wallets. Over the full 12 hours before the announcement the market traded $946,165 in 4,571 fills, against a quiet-period average of $491 per 12 hours.

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Every hour of the 30 days before the window gives one 12-hour price change, 709 in all. The median absolute change was 0.05 points, 99% were within 0.9 points and the largest was 1.15 points.

The final 12 hours moved 57 times that largest change. Over 24 hours the multiple is 74.

The same statistic was computed for every award in the tape whose result is fixed before a scheduled reveal: Oscars and Grammys categories, NFL and MLB MVPs, the Heisman, the Game Awards, the Ballon d'Or and the Nobel Peace Prize, 11 announcement moments in all. The window closes at the start of the ceremony or broadcast.

Two winners rose by more than 20 points. The second, NFL MVP 2024-25 (Josh Allen), rose 48.0 points, which was 0.74 times that market's own largest 12-hour move in the preceding month. Three winners moved outside their own 30-day range, and the favourite 24 hours out won 34 times.

Trading always picks up before an announcement: across the set, the final 12 hours traded a median 15.5 times the quiet-period average. The next-largest surge after the Nobel was 112 times.

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Three days after the 2025 announcement, Kristian Berg Harpviken, director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute and secretary of the committee, told Norway's TV2 that the possible leak was "highly likely" espionage and that the institute would investigate. This study measures the market, not the leak.

Prices are Polymarket's CLOB price history at 10-minute resolution; a price is the last point at or before the instant. The pre-announcement change is the price one second before the scheduled start minus the price 12 hours earlier. The baseline is every 12-hour change on an hourly grid over the 30 days before that window.

Dollars, fills and taker wallets come from the Polymarket-v1 fill tape, where one row is one maker fill. Wallets are counted, never listed. Awards decided live on the night (Eurovision) are kept out of the base rate, as are markets without 30 days of price history.