Most markets on SOAR are not standalone questions. They come in survival ladders:
a row of binary markets on ascending valuation thresholds for the same company, each
asking “is this company worth more than $T?” for a different T.
Each rung is an ordinary binary market with its own book.
What makes it a ladder is the relationship between them.
Monotonicity
Exceeding a higher threshold is never more likely than exceeding a lower one:
So rung prices should descend as strikes rise. This holds by the structure of the
question, not by anyone enforcing it on the book — which means you will sometimes
see it violated, from thin liquidity or a stale quote on one rung.
A pair of rungs quoted out of order is the most legible inefficiency on the venue,
and finding it needs nothing but two prices from the same snapshot. It is where most
ladder strategies start.
The ladder is a distribution
Because each rung price is a survival probability, the differences between adjacent
rungs are the probability mass in each band:
Five prices give you the market’s whole view of where the company’s valuation lands,
and you can compute an expected value from it directly. This is the reason to model a
ladder as one object rather than five unrelated markets: a view about the valuation
is a view about the shape of that distribution, and it usually implies trades on
several rungs at once.
Prices are not probabilities exactly — the spread and fees sit between them — so treat
this as the market’s estimate, not an oracle.
Addressing a ladder
Tickers nest by prefix, three levels:
So series ⊂ event ⊂ market, and two useful things follow:
GET /v1/events/{event_ticker} returns every rung of that quarter’s ladder,
ordered by strike. One call, whole ladder.- Passing the series ticker returns every quarter in the series.
Tenors are quarter-granular (26Q3, never 26) because ladder events roll quarterly.
A year-only tenor would collide with the next roll.
Containment is a prefix guarantee, not a decomposition rule.Every market ticker begins with its event ticker — that always holds. Splitting a
market ticker back into event and strike does not: strikes contain dots
(212.5B and 2125B are different rungs) and nothing forbids a hyphen inside one.
Cutting on the last - works on today’s labels and is not part of this contract.Use the event_ticker field, which every market, order, and position carries. And
never sanitize a ticker to alphanumeric — the dots are load-bearing.The series segment is assigned, not derived. It is usually the company symbol plus
the category spelled out, as above — but an operator may name a series outright, and
then it is simply whatever precedes the tenor: STRP-PYPL-26Q4 has series
STRP-PYPL, which is neither a symbol nor a category. Read series_ticker off the
response instead of assembling it, and never infer one company’s series from another’s.
Rungs trade independently
Each rung has its own book, its own order flow, and its own fills. A fill on the 500Brungisnotafillonthe750B rung, and there is no single order that spans both — a
band view is two orders, placed and managed separately.
Resolution
Each rung resolves against the same final valuation, independently: every rung whose
strike the valuation exceeded pays out yes, and the rest pay out no. Because the
thresholds are ordered, that is always a contiguous block of rungs settling yes from
the bottom.
See Settlement. 
