About Brierly
The name
The firm is named for the Brier score, the canonical measure of whether a forecaster's stated probabilities were honest. Every probabilistic call Brierly publishes is Brier-scored in public, wins and misses alike. The name is the methodology.
The design
One firm, one verification standard, seven lines of work — the integrity layer for a market on its way to $1T/yr volume:
| RuleScore™ | Settlement-risk ratings on every liquid market: 0–100 grades, five failure-type subscores, published methodology, quoted evidence, reproducibility hashes. |
| Dispute Database | The coded record of every major 2025–26 settlement dispute — venue, notional, failure type, outcome, sources. The rubric's public evidence base. |
| The Desk | Written institutional research with a public, Brier-scored track record — honest including the misses, git-stamped so it can't be quietly edited. |
| Uncertainty Index | The Event-Market Uncertainty Index (EMU): transparent, thin-market-robust benchmarks from event-market prices. |
| The Archive | Research-grade point-in-time market history with rules-as-amended versioning and dispute annotations. |
| EventBasis | The tax engine for 2.5–3.5M US event-contract traders facing four open characterizations and no 1099s. |
| Advisory | Rulebook settlement audits and NPRM gap analysis for the ten pending DCM applicants. |
Operating principles
- Independence is the product. No platform owns Brierly's voice; conflicts are disclosed; ratings governance is firewalled from exchange-affiliated investors.
- Verification-log discipline: every public claim carries a source and a date. Numbers come from primary documents, never from memory.
- Grade risk of dispute, never who is right.
- Score every public prediction. Publish the misses. A record that can't lose isn't a record.
- Opinions and datasets, not dashboards-for-dashboards'-sake — judgment nobody else publishes.
- Data rights are respected to the letter: personal-use boundaries honored, commercial products Polymarket-first until written Kalshi consent.
Founder
Founded by Trevor Sardis (Harvard '28 — economics & mathematics; ex-WithumSmith+Brown financial analyst intern). The firm's writing ships under his name, with his record attached.
The bet, stated plainly: every market that reaches institutional scale grows an infrastructure belt worth 1–3% of its trading layer, and the seats in this one are still empty. Everything on this site is built to compound in public — grades, records, indices, datasets — until the seats are taken.
Contact: trevorsardis@gmail.com · research collaborations welcome (Kalshi academic program, university data partners).
The questions investors ask
If regulation mandates clarity, doesn't that kill ratings?
History says the opposite: mandated disclosure expands third-party verification rather than replacing it — securities law created the audit profession, and standardized bond disclosures grew the ratings agencies. Venue self-policing covers conduct (surveillance, manipulation), not contract language; and a venue grading its own listings is structurally conflicted — it wrote the language it would be grading. A disclosure mandate raises the floor; an independent grader prices the distance from the ceiling.
Why would exchanges tolerate an outside grader?
For the same reason issuers tolerate auditors: independent verification is what lets the next, more conservative pool of capital participate. Solidus and Eventus watch the order flow; Brierly grades the contract. The layers are complements, and only one of them can credibly come from a party with no listings to defend.
Independence & conflicts
Brierly trades a small, capped proprietary paper book for research purposes under published rules (maker-only discipline, hard caps, kill criteria). Positions never influence grades; the methodology is deterministic and public precisely so that claim is checkable. Venue data terms are honored — Kalshi-side commercial products await written consent, price-derived products launch Polymarket-first, and this page will say so for as long as that's true.