Crowd Cost Basis
The idea
Crowd cost basis estimates where the most volume has changed hands — the price levels where market participants actually committed money. Technically this is the point of control of a volume-at-price profile.
Distance and conviction
Distance from crowd basis is the current probability minus that anchor. Conviction is how concentrated volume is around it. A market at 70¢ whose volume mostly traded at 25¢ is priced far from where the crowd entered, on comparatively thin recent agreement.
Limitations
The profile is approximate by construction: hourly snapshots assign traded-volume deltas to the price bucket at observation time. Low profiled volume earns a low-confidence label, and the metric should be read as structure, not signal.
Related
Volume and Open Interest in Prediction Markets · Methodology · Dashboard