We're pleased to congratulate the top three winners of the [<u>Market Pulse Challenge</u>](https://www.metaculus.com/tournament/market-pulse-25q2/) for the 2nd quarter of 2025:

| Rank | Forecaster                                                                 | Total Score |
| ---- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ----------- |
| 1    | [<u>cookics999</u>](https://www.metaculus.com/accounts/profile/121071/)    | 1103.664    |
| 2    | [<u>Russell-viper</u>](https://www.metaculus.com/accounts/profile/245211/) | 1092.286    |
| 3    | [<u>SpottedBear</u>](https://www.metaculus.com/accounts/profile/131523/)   | 989.736     |

Congratulations to the winners and to all forecasters who medaled and won portions of the prize pool. Find the complete leaderboard and prize payouts[ <u>here</u>](https://www.metaculus.com/tournament/market-pulse-25q2/?page=2).

***

### **How the crowd performed**

* [**<u>Relative-return pairs</u>**](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/36332/which-company-will-have-the-highest-return-in-q2-2025/)**:** The community picked the higher-returning asset in all *eight* head-to-head questions—something you’d expect to happen by chance only \~0.4% of the time.
* [**<u>Volatility</u>**](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/36292/weekly-maximum-intraday-vix-in-q2-2025/)**:** Forecasts kept the max intraday VIX well below panic territory, and the market indeed remained in a low-volatility regime.

*Maximum intraday value of the VIX over the following weeks:*

<img height="236" width="567" src="https://metaculus-web-media.s3.amazonaws.com/user_uploaded/image_sKXZvgb.png" />

* [**<u>Fundamentals</u>**](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/36283/early-2025-revenues-for-the-following-companies/)**:** Actual Q2 revenues and EPS for AAPL, MSFT, NVDA, and AMD landed neatly inside the densest part of the forecast distributions.

*First reported revenues after March 2025:*

<img height="209" width="557" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXcCNO6BDId_ysXHB6KCm6QmXYfltgL7wMVO5sjELlsVqYE8ThzlZn6-VCbC5_sU8ZKR3bFktPlRLHMbkiY_8tgv1J_aSTVqRUfTfaRpNhCyqiSB4ltNLnc5NZNGLfmf5GnrAr0YIA?key=mKE6kY8iOwVUCQjt63nnrA" />

The Market Pulse Challenge was designed to test whether community forecasts contain signal not already captured by market prices. The Q2 results suggest they do. We’ll continue testing for actionable signal in Market Pulse Challenge 25Q3, now live.

These results suggest a signal that’s repeatable; the next challenge is spotting big regime shifts as they happen.

### [**<u>Forecast in the Market Pulse Challenge 25Q3</u>**](https://www.metaculus.com/tournament/market-pulse-25q3/)

The next Market Pulse Challenge is live with **ten new questions** and a prize pool of \$7,500. Tournament questions will focus on earnings releases, credit-spread closes, asset-pair match-ups, and more. First questions closing **July 18**.

*Nothing in this post should be considered investment advice.*