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America votes on Tuesday. Prediction markets give the Democrats a 94.5% chance of winning the House and 71.5% of winning the Senate.
The seat that decides the Senate is Texas. Democrats hold 34 of the seats not up for election, so they need 17 of this year's 35 races for a majority. Rank those races by the money's odds and the 17th is Texas, where James Talarico, a Democrat, is on 70.5% against Ken Paxton, the Republican. Texas has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1988.
It is a close finish. Ohio, Alaska, Texas and Maine all sit between 69.5% and 73.5%. Kansas, where two polls now put Adam Hamilton, a Democrat and a Methodist pastor, ahead, has become a coin toss at 51.5%. If Alaska is as close as we think (see The Fakers), the seat that decides the Senate becomes Maine.
The first polls close at 23:00 GMT on Tuesday and the last, in Alaska and Hawaii, at about 05:00 GMT on Wednesday. Our midterms page follows the price of every race through the night.
North Korea Strikes
The rehearsal began on Wednesday. Small sums of Ethereum, drawn through Tornado Cash, a service that hides where coins came from, arrived in a fresh wallet. Its owner tested a piece of code, ran it again and sent the test money back. About four hours later the code was sitting inside one of Binance's hot wallets, the accounts the world's biggest crypto exchange uses to pay out withdrawals. At 20:05 GMT on Thursday the money started to move. In about 20 minutes some $6.3bn had gone, across ten blockchains.
Three firms that trace crypto, TRM Labs, Chainalysis and Elliptic, name the same culprit: TraderTraitor, a clandestine team of North Korean state hackers that does little but rob crypto firms. Chainalysis watched the stolen coins being mixed, in real time, with money taken in September from Bitget, another exchange, in a theft already blamed on North Korea. America's FBI pinned last year's $1.5bn raid on Bybit on the same group. That was the record until Thursday.
Lazarus Group, another arm of North Korea’s elite hacking units.
TraderTraitor rarely breaks down a door. It gets someone to open one. In 2024 an operative posing as a recruiter on LinkedIn sent an engineer at Ginco, a Japanese software firm, a coding test laced with malware; the FBI and Japanese police say that led to the theft of $308m from DMM Bitcoin, a Japanese exchange. Bybit's thieves got in through the computer of a developer at Safe, which supplied its wallet software. Binance says its intruders came in through an engineer's compromised laptop and from there sent withdrawals nobody had approved. It has not said how the laptop was compromised.
Then came the getaway, planned just as carefully. Stablecoins can be frozen by the firms that issue them; ethereum cannot. So the thieves sold about $325m of Tether for ether at roughly 10% below the market price. Their bitcoin was chopped into round lots of 1,000 and 100 coins within a single block, and thousands of automated transfers followed. The issuers were quick too: Tether, Circle and others have frozen about $3bn. But TRM reckons the hackers still hold more than 420,000 ether and 18,270 bitcoin, about $2.4bn that nobody can freeze.
For Pyongyang this is less a crime than an industry. North Korea's hackers stole about $2bn in 2025, a record and roughly 60% of all the crypto stolen that year, by Chainalysis's count. Thursday's haul alone is three times as much. A panel of UN experts reckoned in 2024 that cyber theft brought in about half of the regime's foreign currency and helped pay for its weapons. TRM expects the next stage to run through cross-chain bridges, swap services and over-the-counter brokers.
Binance says it has already covered 90% of the loss and will reopen withdrawals on Sunday, in stages. Prediction markets believe it: they give a 4.3% chance that Binance or another big exchange goes bust this year. They are as calm about the man who benefits. The chance that Kim Jong Un is out of power by the end of the year is 3.1%.
Binance must now show customers a fresh count of its reserves by Monday. North Korea will be planning its next hack already.
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Not just a pretty face.
For five days the guns around Oleshky, a Russian-held town across the Dnieper from Kherson, have been quiet. Melania Trump pressed for the pause so that civilians could get out. On Friday bus convoys took them through Crimea and planes flew them on to Gomel, in Belarus; those who chose Ukraine were due to cross within hours. She says the convoy could carry more than 750 people. The truce is due to end on Sunday.
Bigger talks may follow. On October 21st Vladimir Putin told Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump's envoy, that he agreed 'in principle' to resume three-way talks with America and Ukraine after November 10th. Prediction markets give 73% to talks by November 30th. Before that meeting they gave about 20%.
Talking is not the same as stopping.
Melania Trump and Vladimir Putin at the G20 Summit
The money gives a ceasefire agreement by the end of the year 14.5%.
Volodymyr Zelensky wants talks soon but doubts Russia will turn up: it has said it was ready before, and then cancelled.
Oleshky got five quiet days. The negotiators get a month, and the money thinks they will at least show up.
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Alaska: Double Trouble
Alaskans will find two Dan Sullivans on their Senate ballot on Tuesday. One is Dan Sullivan, the Republican senator seeking a third term. The other is Dan Sullivan, a retired teacher from Petersburg and no relation, whom state election officials struck off in June. The courts put him back.
On Friday the Justice Department, which has been investigating for months, asked a judge to have ballots that rank the second Sullivan kept separate. It has not said a crime took place.
Prediction markets give Mary Peltola, the Democrat, a 72.5% chance of winning. We think that is too generous. Five October polls give her leads of one to five points, worth nearer 60%.
Dan Sullivan (left), Dan Sullivan (right)
Alaska's polls have flattered Democrats before: in 2020 they had Mr Trump winning the state by about seven points, and he won by ten.
The money leans on the August primary, which Ms Peltola won by eight points. She won her primary in 2024 too, then lost the seat. And the second Sullivan helps her less than it seems: under ranked-choice voting, a ballot meant for the senator still reaches him if the voter ranked him next.
Our read: Ms Peltola wins, but it is closer than the money thinks. In Alaska this week, not everything on the ballot is what it seems.
Watch this space.
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Will California vote for the Billionaire Tax?
Now you can ask us anything the odds could settle. Send a question in the box below and we'll pick one for next week's letter. If we pick yours, we'll send you $100.
If Californians like the idea of taxing billionaires, why does the money say they won't?
On Tuesday Californians vote on Proposition 40, a one-off tax of 5% on the wealth of anyone in the state worth $1bn or more, to make up for federal cuts to health care. Prediction markets give it a 26.5% chance of passing, up five points in a week.
The polls have gone the other way. In September the Public Policy Institute of California found 52% of likely voters in favour. Its October poll, taken from October 16th to 22nd, found 46% for and 52% against. Opponents, among them Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, have spent more than $300m against it and on two rival measures. Gavin Newsom, the governor, is against it too.
Our read: Proposition 40 fails. Ballot measures tend to lose support as polling day nears, and this one has already slipped below half against the best-funded opposition in the state. One chance in four, if anything, flatters it. A late poll back above 50% would change our mind.
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Spain’s Left is in disarray.
Prediction markets give Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the conservative People's Party (PP), an 84% chance of becoming Spain's prime minister after the snap election on November 29th. Pedro Sánchez, the Socialist prime minister, called it on October 5th, three days after Congress threw out two of his housing decrees. Here is the case for the man the money has written off.
Start with 2023. Then too the PP led the polls and won the most seats, 137 of 350. Mr Feijóo still could not reach the 176 needed to govern. Mr Sánchez could. He stitched together 179 votes from the far left and from Catalan and Basque separatists, at the price of an amnesty for those behind Catalonia's unlawful bid for independence in 2017. Spain's parliament has rewarded the deal-maker before, not the poll leader.
Then look at the arithmetic. The PP is polling about 32%, so it needs Vox, a hard-right party on about 19%, to govern. Fear of Vox in power helped the Socialists in 2023, and could again. The CIS, Spain's state pollster, even puts the Socialists ahead, on 34% to the PP's 22%.
The case against is stronger. The CIS sits far from every private pollster, and the average gives the PP a lead of more than five points. A GAD3 poll for ABC, a newspaper, hands the PP and Vox 198 seats between them, a majority with room to spare. Junts, the Catalan separatists who made Mr Sánchez prime minister, helped vote down his housing decrees. And the train crash near Toledo on October 28th, which killed nearly 70 people, has the right blaming his transport minister with a month to go.
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