Realtime Stream

The Realtime Stream is a live, no-refresh feed of market activity across Polymarket and Kalshi. Open it at **/dashboard/realtime** and leave it running: prices, volume, and the biggest movers update on their own while you work. It is built as a heads-up display (HUD) — a single screen you keep visible on a second monitor or phone so you never miss a market repricing while you are reading signals, sizing a position, or watching a whale.

This page is read-only intelligence. It shows you what is happening; it does not place orders. Execution lives in [Live Trading](/docs/live-trading) and the bot stack. The Realtime Stream exists to give you the fastest possible awareness of movement, so you can act in the right tool a few seconds sooner.

## What It Does

Behind the page is a **Server-Sent Events (SSE)** connection to `/api/realtime/stream`. SSE is a one-way, long-lived HTTP stream from our servers to your browser — lighter than a raw WebSocket, and far more reliable through corporate proxies, mobile carriers, and CDNs that mangle WebSocket upgrades. You will see a small **SSE** badge on the live table confirming the transport.

Once connected, the stream pushes a fresh snapshot of active markets every few seconds. Each row carries:

At the top, a **Top Movers** strip surfaces the five markets with the largest absolute 1-hour move, regardless of direction. That is your at-a-glance "what is hot right now" panel — the markets most likely to be reacting to fresh news or a large order hitting the book.

A note on the change percentages: they reflect the **real price delta reported upstream**. When the source does not provide a 1h or 24h delta for a given market, the field reads `0` / `—` rather than a fabricated number. If you see a flat `0.0%`, that means "no reported movement," not "we made something up." Trust the teal and rose only when there is a real figure behind them.

## Connection Status, Always Visible

The top-left status pill is the single most important element on the page. It has two states:

Next to the pill, a **last-updated timestamp** shows the local time of the most recent snapshot, and a market count shows how many contracts are currently in the feed. Glance at the timestamp before you trust the numbers: if the pill says LIVE but the timestamp is two minutes stale, something upstream stalled and you should treat the prices as indicative, not exact.

## How To Use It

1. Open **/dashboard/realtime** from the sidebar. The page connects automatically — there is no "start" button. 2. Wait for the status pill to flip to **LIVE**. The first snapshot usually lands within a second or two; on a cold serverless start it may take a moment longer. 3. Scan the **Top Movers** strip first. These five cards tell you where the action is before you read a single table row. 4. Use the **filter box** to narrow the table. Type any part of a market question — "election", "Fed", "BTC", a candidate name — and the table instantly shows only matching markets. The filter is case-insensitive and matches substrings, so partial words work. 5. Watch the rows you care about. New snapshots replace the table in place; rows do not scroll away or require a reload. 6. When a market moves enough to act on, jump to the [EV Scanner](/docs/ev-scanner) or the [Market Detail](/docs/reading-signals) view for that contract to confirm the edge, then size and execute in your trading tool of choice.

On mobile the layout switches automatically from a wide table to stacked cards — each market becomes a compact card with YES/NO, 1h, 24h, and volume — so the feed stays readable on a narrow screen without horizontal scrolling.

## Pause and Resume

The stream is designed to run unattended, but you control its lifecycle through the page itself:

If you want a persistent HUD, the recommended pattern is to dock the page in its own browser window or a second monitor and simply leave it open. It will keep itself alive and reconnect through interruptions on its own (see below). When you are done for the session, close that window so the connection is released.

## Reconnect Behavior on Flaky Networks

This is where the Realtime Stream earns its keep on mobile and unreliable Wi-Fi. The client does not just connect once and give up — it actively defends the connection.

### Exponential backoff

When the stream drops, the client retries with increasing delays: **1s, 2s, 4s, 8s, 16s, then capped at 30s**. This avoids hammering the server during an outage while still recovering quickly from a brief blip. The moment a reconnect succeeds, the backoff **resets to 1s**, so the next hiccup is handled fast rather than starting from a long delay.

### Network-flip recovery

Mobile devices constantly switch between Wi-Fi and 4G/5G, and each handoff briefly takes the device offline. The page listens for the browser's **online** event: the instant connectivity returns, it cancels any pending backoff timer and reconnects **immediately**, rather than waiting out the current delay. Conversely, while the device reports itself offline, the client skips connection attempts entirely and waits for the network to come back — no wasted retries against a dead radio.

### Background-tab recovery

Browsers — especially on phones — often kill or freeze SSE connections when a tab goes to the background to save battery. The page listens for **visibility changes**: when you switch back to the tab and it becomes visible again, the client checks whether the stream is still open. If it was killed in the background, it reconnects immediately. In practice this means you can lock your phone, come back ten minutes later, tap the tab, and see fresh data almost instantly instead of a frozen screen.

The takeaway for traders: **trust the status pill, not your assumptions.** If you have been away, glance at the pill and the last-updated timestamp when you return. If it shows LIVE with a current timestamp, the recovery worked and the numbers are good. If it is still Reconnecting after a few seconds on a known-good network, a manual page refresh forces a clean restart.

## Security: Periodic Auth Re-Check

The stream is authenticated, and it stays authenticated for its entire life — not just at the moment you open it.

Because access is tied to your live session, signing out anywhere stops the feed everywhere. For more on session handling and account protection, see [Security](/docs/security).

## Plan Requirements

The Realtime Stream requires the **Pro plan ($59/mo)** or the **Bot plan ($99/mo)**. It is not available on Starter ($29/mo). If you are on Starter, the page shows an upgrade gate instead of the live feed.

What each tier gets here is the same live feed — the difference is what you can *do* with the awareness it gives you:

To be explicit: spotting a move here is available from Pro up, but **placing a real order requires the Bot plan**. The Realtime Stream never executes trades itself — it is intelligence, and execution is a separate, gated capability.

## Tips for Using It as a HUD

## Common Gotchas

## Related Docs