You place an order into a peer-to-peer, sports-only order book and get matched against another user, not a house line. That's the whole core of it: Novig is a sports prediction market where every trade needs a real person on the other side, and the app's job is matching orders, not setting lines against you.
A standard -110 sportsbook line means risking $110 to win $100 on either side — you need to win 52.4% of your bets just to break even, because the vig is baked into both numbers. The same coin-flip game on Novig prices at 50¢/50¢. No vig, because there's no house side to bake it into. Win half your bets at a true coin-flip price on Novig and you actually break even; do the same at -110 and you're still under water.
You Trade Against Other People, Not A House
A sportsbook posts a line and takes your bet itself. Novig does neither, and the difference runs deeper than branding — an exchange is not a sportsbook. It runs an order book, which is just a public list of orders: what people are willing to pay, and what people are asking. You can take a price someone else posted, or post your own and wait for a user to take it. When two orders meet, the trade happens. The platform is the referee, not your opponent.
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The first thing that trips up sportsbook users is the prices. Novig quotes probabilities, not American odds. A contract does not read -150 or +170; it reads as a price between 0 and 1, and that price is the market's implied chance the outcome happens. A contract trading at 0.60 implies a 60% chance. If you want the translation habit anyway, our guide to converting contract prices into American odds covers it in two minutes.
Settlement is just as binary. Every contract settles at $1 if the outcome happens and $0 if it does not, and your profit is the gap between your entry price and where it settles. There is no middle ground and no pushed bet: the market resolves to one end or the other.
The second thing is a quirk of binary markets that makes books look emptier than they are. Every market has two sides, Yes and No, and the two are the same instrument viewed from opposite ends. A bid to buy Yes at 0.60 (a 60% implied chance) is exactly an offer to sell No at 0.40 (a 40% implied chance), because the two prices must add up to 1. So a screen that shows no offers on your side is not necessarily a dead market. The liquidity may simply be resting on the other side, where it counts just the same.
A Worked Example: One Order, Start To Finish
Take a WNBA moneyline market where the home team's Yes contract last traded at 62 cents, meaning the crowd of traders puts the home side at about a 62% chance. Here is the full life of one order. (Prices here are illustrative of the mechanic, not live quotes.)
| Step | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1. You Post | You bid 62 cents for one Yes contract on the home team. |
| 2. The Book Shows It | Your bid appears to everyone else as an offer to sell No at 38 cents, because the two sides always sum to $1. |
| 3. Someone Matches | Another user takes the other side. You now hold Yes at 62 cents; they hold No at 38 cents. Novig matched you; it holds nothing. |
| 4. The Game Ends | Home team wins: your contract settles at $1 and you make 38 cents per contract. Home team loses: it settles at $0 and you lose your 62 cents. |
Notice the platform's role in that table: it appears exactly once, as the matchmaker in step 3. The whole trade is you against one other person, from post to settlement, and the price you agreed on is the probability you both signed up for.
Sports Only: No Elections, No Weather, No Fed
Here is the fact that surprises almost everyone arriving from Kalshi or Polymarket coverage: Novig is sports only. "Prediction market" usually implies you can trade elections, the weather, or the next Fed decision. On Novig you cannot trade any of them. Not politics, not economics, not crypto prices, not temperature. It has never listed a non-sports market.
When we pulled Novig's full market catalog on August 4, 2026, its entire market history covered eight leagues: ATP and WTA tennis, MLB, MLS, the NFL, the PGA Tour, UFC, and the WNBA. Zero non-sports markets, ever. The league rail on the live site showed the same picture the same day. This is not a temporary gap while other categories load. Novig's federal designation covers sports event contracts specifically, so sports is the product, not the starter menu.
That narrowness is why the label matters. Novig is a sports prediction market, or just a sports exchange. Calling it a prediction market with no qualifier sets you up to look for markets that do not exist there. If you want the broader event-contract world Novig deliberately skips, the category primer on how prediction markets work maps it, and our live hub tracks how these markets work in practice.
What You Sign Up For Today
Novig went live nationwide on August 4, 2026 as a CFTC-regulated, real-money sports prediction market, retiring the dual-currency sweepstakes product that came before it. Its exchange entity, Ludlow Exchange, LLC, holds the Designated Contract Market status the CFTC granted June 16, 2026 — the same class of federal designation Kalshi operates under. ProphetX won its own designation days earlier, so this was a two-venue shift toward regulated sports exchanges, not a single launch. We compared the two venues in ProphetX vs Novig. (Disclosure: OddsShopper has an affiliate relationship with ProphetX. We have none with Novig, and nothing on this page is sponsored by either.)
What you get at sign-up now is a welcome offer on the live exchange — our Novig sign-up bonus breakdown covers the current terms.
Where You Can Use It
Novig offers broad, state-specific availability under federal oversight, and the footprint can still shift as new states clear. Any state list you screenshot today can be wrong next month. The one check that stays current is the app's own eligibility check for your state, and our guide to where you can use it walks through exactly that. You must be 21 or older.
What It Costs To Trade
Novig's pitch is that peer-to-peer trading is commission-free, with no vig baked into the quote. The claim is theirs, not ours, and the mechanism behind it is real: because the price is a probability and your counterparty is another user, there is no house margin built into the number the way a sportsbook builds its cut into -110 pricing. The two sides of a market add to 1, not to 1-plus-juice.
No vig in the quote does not mean trading is free. Your real cost on any order book is the spread, the gap between what buyers bid and sellers ask. Cross it for an instant fill and you paid it. Post your own order and wait, and you might get the number you wanted, or you might never get filled. We are not telling you Novig's prices are better or worse than anyone else's; price quality is a claim you should demand measurement for, and it is not this page's job. The honest advice is the one that works on every platform: compare any quote against the wider market before you act. Our free live odds screen shows the number across every major book for exactly that reason.
How Deep The Books Actually Are
The checkable strength of Novig is breadth: how many of its listed markets actually carry live orders you could trade against. In our August 4, 2026 catalog read, 236 of 254 MLB stolen-base markets carried resting orders — about 93% of a niche prop board, the kind of market that sits empty on plenty of platforms, quoted almost wall to wall that day. Breadth is a snapshot and moves daily, so treat the number as a dated reading rather than a promise. But it says something concrete about the product: this order book is not a ghost town.
Note what we measured there: how many markets were quoted, not how good the quotes were. Those are different questions, and the second one is where marketing loves to live.
The Risk You Should Understand First
One habit to bring to any binary market, Novig included. When you sell an unlikely outcome, you collect a small premium and risk most of a dollar — sell a contract priced around 6% and you are collecting six cents to put roughly 94% of a dollar at risk. Roughly speaking, one loss erases the premiums from about 15 wins. That asymmetry, not your hit rate, is what decides whether a long-shot-selling style survives, and it is the single most common way order-book newcomers hurt themselves. If the shape of that trade is new to you, read up before you size up.
For transparency: Stokastic, our parent company, actively trades prediction markets and holds positions in them, which is exactly why we write about the mechanics rather than telling you what to trade. Nothing on this page is a pick or a recommendation, and event contracts can lose their full worth.
More on this: How Does Kalshi Work? Fees, Odds Conversion & 5 Rookie Mistakes · How Does Polymarket Work? Markets, Funding And Settlement · Novig Odds Display · Novig Odds Format Change: Why Your Moneyline Is Now A Percentage · Kalshi Vs Novig: Two Exchanges, One Very Different Fee
In Summary
Novig is narrower than the "prediction market" label suggests and simpler than a sportsbook underneath: a sports-only order book where you are matched against people, priced in probabilities, now a CFTC-regulated exchange. The mechanic is the durable part. The wrapper already changed once — a sweepstakes product until August 2026, a CFTC-designated exchange under Ludlow Exchange since — while the catalog stays exactly what it has always been: eight sports leagues and nothing else. In the meantime, the compare-the-market habit works anywhere, starting with today's free expert picks.
21+. Availability varies by state; check eligibility in the app. Event contracts involve risk and can lose their full worth. Nothing here is trading or betting advice. OddsShopper has no commercial relationship with Novig; we do carry offers for some other platforms, disclosed where named above.
