How to read a Polymarket price ladder

The ladder is Desk's main trading surface — a vertical price column showing all the live liquidity on a Polymarket market, built for one-click precision. Once you can read its five columns you can place, rest and exit a trade without ever leaving it.

The five columns

The ladder reads top to bottom as a single price scale, with one row — a rung — for every tradeable level. Each rung carries the same five columns:

Price — every tradeable level, shown in whatever language you've chosen (percent, cents, decimal or American odds). This is where you click to trade.
Lay — resting money on the lay side (buying "No"), with a depth bar whose length shows how much size is waiting at that level.
Back — resting money on the back side (buying "Yes"), again with a depth bar for the size at that price.
P&L — what each level means for your position: the profit or loss you'd be sitting on if the market settled at that price.
Hist — a mini history spark showing recent activity at that rung, so you can see where trade has been clustering.

The depth bars turn a wall of numbers into a shape — a long bar is a lot of resting size, a short one is thin liquidity you'll walk through quickly.

The touch — the best price

The touch is the best price currently available: the tightest point where Back and Lay meet. Desk keeps it in the centre of the ladder so the action is always in front of you, with better prices above and worse prices below.

As the market moves, auto-centre quietly scrolls the ladder so the live price stays in the middle — you never have to chase it up or down the column. If you scroll away to inspect a distant level, a tap brings you back to centre.

Placing a trade

Every trade is three actions, and Desk is built so you can do them in about a second:

Set your stake. Type an amount, or tap one of the four quick-stake buttons. Those four values are yours to set in Settings, so your usual sizes are always one tap away.
Pick a side. Click a price in the Back column to buy "Yes", or in the Lay column to buy "No".
Choose now or later. Click the price at the touch to fill immediately against the resting money there. Click a better price instead and Desk rests an order that waits for the market to come to you.

Tip

The P&L column updates as you hover, so you can see exactly what a fill at any rung would do to your position before you click.

A worked example

Suppose a market is trading with the touch at 60¢ and you think "Yes" is going higher.

Tap the $60 quick-stake button.
Click the 60¢ rung in the Back column. You take the resting size at the touch and are filled at once — 100 shares of "Yes".
Prefer a discount? Click 58¢ in the Back column instead. Nothing fills yet; your order rests at 58¢ until a seller meets it — or you cancel.

To exit later, you do the same thing on the other side: click a Lay rung to sell your "Yes" shares back into the book. The P&L column tells you what each exit level banks.

Why a ladder beats a plain order box

A one-line order form hides the shape of the market. The ladder shows you the whole book at once — where the size is, how far the touch is from the next wall of liquidity, and what every level does to your position — so your click is an informed one. It's the same instrument professional traders use on financial exchanges, brought to Polymarket.