Common sense in oil earnings pays 12% on Wednesday night

Occidental Petroleum reports Q2 results on Wednesday evening. Polymarket traders price an 89% probability that the company's non-GAAP earnings come in above $1.88 a share. At 89 cents, the contract returns 12.4% when trading closes at 9 pm Eastern.

$1.88 is a snapshot of the analyst forecast taken on July 24, and Polymarket names no source for it, which is very important because that forecast, for example, is $1.96 on Nasdaq. It settles on the non-GAAP figure in Occidental's own release, with Seeking Alpha as the fallback, so no analyst number is consulted on Wednesday at all. And it says greater than, so exactly $1.88 pays nothing.

Here is why 89 cents is the side to be on. On July 10, Occidental published the prices it actually got for the quarter, three weeks before it had to.

• Oil sold for $96.93 a barrel in America and $95.83 abroad, $96.78 worldwide
• The company earned $0.39 a share in the same quarter of 2025
• It reported $1.06 against $0.60 expected in May, beating by 76%
• It has cleared the forecast in each of the last four quarters
• Average diluted shares were 1,012.2m, so the denominator is already fixed