Risk Disclaimer

⚠️ Read this first

Sifaka publishes research on prediction markets. We are NOT licensed investment advisers, NOT a broker, NOT a fund, and NOT a financial planner. Nothing on this site is investment advice. You can lose money trading prediction markets, and many traders do.

If you don't fully understand the points below, do NOT subscribe and do NOT trade based on our signals.

1. Prediction markets are speculative

Polymarket and similar prediction markets resolve based on external events (elections, sports outcomes, news). Outcomes are often binary — your position resolves to $1.00 (full payout) or $0.00 (total loss). There is no concept of "diversification within a market." Your downside on any single trade is your full stake.

2. Our signals can be wrong

Our pipeline combines large language model inference, statistical models, and rule-based gates. All three can produce errors:

• The LLM may hallucinate or misinterpret news.
• The statistical model may overweight noise or underweight a regime change.
• The rule-based gates may be misconfigured or may fail to gate a degenerate setup.

We work hard on quality (postmortems, paired audits, soak periods, publicly verifiable commitments) but no quality process eliminates signal errors. Historical performance — including the public call P&L dashboard — does not guarantee future performance.

3. Slippage and execution risk are yours

Our published signals show entry / target / stop levels. The price you actually fill at depends on order book depth, latency, your wallet's gas, and market movement between the moment we push the signal and the moment your order hits Polymarket's order book. Realistic subscriber outcomes will deviate from idealized signal backtests.

The public Call P&L dashboard publishes our methodology explicitly: $100/call notional, top-of-book fill estimate with a documented spread assumption. Real subscribers may achieve better or worse fills than the dashboard's model.

4. Polymarket platform risk

Polymarket is a third-party platform. Sifaka has no control over and no responsibility for:

• Polymarket platform availability, downtime, or geographic access restrictions.
• Order book conditions, market maker presence, fee changes.
• UMA Optimistic Oracle resolutions, including disputes that can change a market's outcome weeks after the event.
• Smart contract risk on Polygon (chain reorgs, bridge issues, UMA disputes that delay resolution payouts).
• Regulatory action against Polymarket or the prediction-market industry that could impair your ability to trade.

5. Sifaka also trades — and that's deliberate

Sifaka operates its own trading capital based on the same signals we publish to subscribers. This is by design — it aligns our incentives with yours. But it also means:

• If our self-trading meaningfully moves the order book, you and we both eat the resulting slippage. We attempt to mitigate this through small absolute trade sizing.
• If subscribers act on a signal en masse before we fill, OR if we fill before subscribers, the order of operations matters and will not always favor subscribers. We don't claim the subscriber-first ordering that some signal services advertise.
• Sifaka's own trading P&L will differ from the published Call P&L (which models a generic subscriber's experience) and from the published monthly attestation (Sifaka's actual fund returns).

6. The trust model — what we publicly verify, and what we don't

What is independently verifiable:

• Every signal we push is SHA-256 committed to Polygon at push time. 30 days later we publish the plaintext — anyone can recompute the hash and check it matches the on-chain commitment.
• Public call-P&L dashboard is computed from public data (signal commitments + Polymarket public price API). An open-source verifier reproduces all numbers; we publish CI badges for the verifier's daily PASS/FAIL state.

What is self-attested but not externally verifiable today:

• Sifaka's actual fund P&L is published as a signed monthly attestation. The signature proves Sifaka's operator EOA signed the numbers, but the numbers come from our internal trading DB which is not directly auditable on-chain. We disclose this gap explicitly on every attestation.
• The trading wallets are intentionally kept private to protect alpha. Phase 2 (planned) will introduce an on-chain vault with publicly verifiable NAV — at that point fund P&L becomes independently verifiable. Until that point, Sifaka's self-attested numbers carry the trust assumptions of any self-published claim.

7. Tax

You are responsible for the tax consequences of your trading. Sifaka does not provide tax advice. Tax treatment of prediction-market winnings varies wildly by jurisdiction; consult a qualified tax professional in your country.

8. No guarantee of service

We aim for high availability but do not guarantee 100% uptime. Maintenance windows, model updates, upstream outages (Polymarket, RPC providers, news feeds), and unforeseen issues can interrupt signal delivery. See the Terms of Service for the refund policy in the event of material outages.

9. By subscribing, you acknowledge

That you have read this disclaimer, understand prediction markets carry risk including total loss of position, accept that Sifaka's signals are research output and not investment advice, and accept responsibility for your own trading decisions.