What it is
Hero Market is a play-money prediction market for people building consumer brands. Founders, brand leads, retail buyers, investors, and the press that covers them trade YES/NO positions on the outcomes their industry is about to call — brand launches, mergers and acquisitions, IPO filings, retail distribution wins, regulatory rulings. Categories span CPG, beverage, beauty, apparel, wellness, food, restaurants, retail, media, and consumer tech.
The currency is Sugar Points (SP), a play-money unit; no real money is wagered. Trades are sized in SP and calibration is scored publicly via Brier score, where zero is perfect and 0.25 equals always predicting 50/50. New traders receive 1,000 SP at signup, and balances are floored at 1,000 so traders cannot go broke.
Price is probability.A YES at 72% means the room collectively puts the chance at 72%. The tape is a live consensus, not a magazine. Hero Market exists because operators often spot shifts before headlines do — and now we keep score on who was right.
What you’ll see
Five surfaces do the work:
The signal stack
Four layers price the tape:
- Ingestion. Real-time pulls from a curated set of CPG trade publications, industry handles on X (via the official API), and brand-account posts on Instagram.
- Attribution. A keyword matcher plus per-article LLM verifier tie each story to the markets it actually moves.
- Calibration. Every trade is a forecast. Every forecast is scored on a Brier basis the moment the market resolves. Records are public on every handle.
- Audit. Resolution is reading explicit criteria literally against a primary source. Ambiguity gets voided over resolving against thin information.
The composite is what prices the tape. Read the full architecture in the handbook →
How trading works
You buy YES or NO shares. Winners pay 1 SP each at resolution; losers go to zero. The pool rebalances with every trade, so price moves with conviction. New traders start with 1,000 Sugar Points; the balance is floored at 1,000 so you can’t go broke and stop participating.
SP is the ammo that lets you trade, not the scoreboard. The scoreboard is calibration. Mechanics, liquidity, and the AMM in the handbook →
The audit favors receipts
Volume isn’t skill. Anyone can fire 10,000 SP at a coin flip. We score traders on calibration: a Brier score over the prices they traded at versus actual outcomes, surfaced on every profile and the /accuracy page.
Tier badges (the blue Insider check, the red Admin check) signal industry standing. Calibration signals record. They’re kept separate on purpose: a Consumer with a 0.18 Brier outranks an Insider with 0.30 on the accuracy board regardless of which check sits next to their handle.
The moat we’re building is calibration, not turnover.
The beta
Hero Market is operated by Sugar Capital, based in San Francisco, California. The platform launched in 2026 and is invite-only during the closed beta, scoped to operators in consumer brands. The Hero Market team runs the site and trades alongside everyone else; the prices you see are the trader base’s collective belief, not a curated view. Follow @HeroMarketHQ for product updates.
To request an invite, ask a current trader for their referral or write hello@heromarket.com with a sentence on what category you cover.