On February 8, 2025, someone placed a single trade large enough to drop Brady Corbet's Best Director odds from 86% to 71% in one evening. By the next morning, he was at 43%. Most people found out about it from a tweet the following afternoon.
The Whale Activity Alerts dashboard exists so you don't find out about market-moving trades from Twitter.
What Whale Activity Alerts Does
The dashboard tracks large trades and breaking news across all Oscar prediction markets in real time. When someone places a bet big enough to move the odds, it shows up here. When breaking news hits that could shift a race, it shows up here too.
Think of it as a radar for Oscar market activity. Small trades happen constantly and don't mean much. Large trades, the kind placed by informed bettors and institutional money, tend to signal real information. This dashboard filters out the noise and surfaces the signal.
Key Features
Whale Trade Detection
A "whale" in prediction markets is a bettor placing unusually large positions. In Oscar markets, where total volume might be $3-5 million across all categories, a single $10,000+ trade can visibly move the price.
The dashboard catches these trades and shows you:
- Which category was affected
- The direction of the trade (buy or sell)
- The approximate size relative to normal volume
- The resulting price movement
This is information that used to be visible only to people watching order books in real time. Now it's in one feed.
Shark Activity Tracking
Not every meaningful trade comes from a single whale. Sometimes you see a pattern of moderately large trades, all in the same direction, placed within a short window. We call these "sharks."
Shark activity often precedes whale trades. When multiple informed bettors independently reach the same conclusion, the largest positions tend to follow. Watching shark patterns gives you a heads-up before the biggest moves happen.
Breaking News Feed
Guild award announcements, nomination surprises, and industry news all flow through the same dashboard. When the DGA announces its winner on February 7, 2026, you'll see the announcement alongside the market reaction in real time. No switching between news sites and trading platforms.
How to Use It
Step 1: Set Your Categories
The dashboard covers all 19 Oscar categories. If you only care about Best Picture and the acting races, you can focus there. If you're tracking the full board, everything is visible in one feed.
Step 2: Watch for Patterns
Single whale trades are interesting. Clusters of whale trades in the same category within 24 hours are significant. When you see three large bets on the same nominee in a day, someone knows something or multiple informed bettors have reached the same conclusion independently. Either way, it's a stronger signal than one trade alone.
Step 3: Act or Wait
Not every whale trade is correct. Sometimes large bettors are wrong. The value of the alert isn't that it tells you what to do. It tells you something is happening so you can investigate and decide for yourself.
Real Example
Imagine it's February 9, 2026, two days after the DGA Awards. Paul Thomas Anderson won. His Best Director odds are sitting at 88%. Then at 11:47 PM, the dashboard lights up. Someone just placed a large sell order on PTA's Best Director contract.
That's unusual. Why would someone sell a near-lock? You check the news feed. Nothing public yet. But 45 minutes later, a second large sell hits. And then a shark pattern emerges: four medium-sized sells in an hour.
The next morning, a story breaks about a controversy from the film's production. PTA's odds drop 15 points by noon.
If you were watching the dashboard at 11:47 PM, you had a 12-hour head start on everyone reading the news over breakfast. That's the kind of edge the alerts provide.
Guest vs. Pro Access
Without an account, you can't access the alerts dashboard. This is a pro tool.
With a free account, you get the full real-time dashboard with whale alerts, shark activity, and breaking news across all categories.
Related Tools
- Position Calculator: When a whale trade shifts the odds, use the calculator to model what a position at the new price would cost and pay out.
- Nominees Browser: After seeing a whale alert, check the nominee's full price history to see if the trade is part of a longer trend or a one-time spike.
Key Takeaways
- Whale trades are large bets that visibly move Oscar market odds. This dashboard surfaces them in real time.
- Shark patterns (clusters of medium-large trades in one direction) often precede the biggest market moves
- Breaking news and guild results appear alongside market reactions so you see cause and effect together
- The dashboard covers all 19 categories in one feed
- A 12-hour head start on public information is the difference between catching a price move and reading about it the next day