Trump-Putin Meeting in November: Markets Price an 82% Chance as APEC Summit Nears
The most interesting new number on the prediction markets this weekend is not an election and not a price. It is a meeting. A Polymarket event created on October 31 asks a simple question: who will Donald Trump meet with by November 30? The answers sketch out the whole diplomatic month in one glance. Xi Jinping sits at 96 percent, which is what you would expect when both men are due at the same summit. Vladimir Putin sits at 82 percent. Kim Jong Un sits at 10 percent. The gap between the second and third numbers is the story: traders think a Trump-Putin encounter this month is likely, and a Trump-Kim encounter is a long shot. I agree with the ordering. I am less sure about the 82 percent.
The trigger for the market was a weekend of careful, deniable diplomacy. On Saturday, October 31, on the sidelines of the G20 foreign ministers' meeting in Atlanta, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he had briefly discussed with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov the possibility of the two leaders having an exchange during the APEC summit in Shenzhen, China, on November 18 and 19. Rubio was precise about what this was not: not a formal meeting, but a short exchange of words. Lavrov, for his part, described his conversation with Rubio as "correct." On the same day, Rubio addressed the other half of the market: Trump is open to talks with Kim Jong Un if Pyongyang is prepared to address Washington's concerns and those of its allies, but no meeting has been scheduled and there is nothing to announce.
Behind the Putin number sits a proposal that has been floating for most of October. Putin first raised the idea of a trilateral meeting with Trump and Xi Jinping on a phone call with Trump on October 9, and repeated it to US envoy Steve Witkoff in St. Petersburg on October 21. Trump has said he is open to it, but with a different agenda in mind: nuclear arms talks, not a Ukraine settlement. Beijing has not confirmed anything; its Foreign Ministry says it has no information to disclose. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov concedes there is no clear understanding yet of the meeting or its agenda. I have already taken the view, in an earlier prediction on this site, that the three-way summit itself is unlikely to happen on the APEC sidelines. A bilateral encounter between Trump and Putin is a different, smaller question, and that distinction matters: a pull-aside needs no choreography, no joint statement, and no host's blessing.
The market's definition of a meeting is doing a lot of work here. On Polymarket, a meeting counts as any encounter where both men are present and interact in person. A hallway exchange qualifies. That is one reason the price is so high: if both leaders are in Shenzhen at the same time, avoiding each other entirely would take active effort. But the price also assumes something that has not been publicly confirmed, which is that Putin will be in Shenzhen at all. No attendance list has been published, and the trilateral proposal itself remains unconfirmed by Beijing. There is also a competing track that could absorb the meeting or displace it: Trump has said a meeting with Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy could happen "very soon," with reports pointing to a possible three-way gathering in the United Arab Emirates in early November. A meeting in the Gulf would still count for this market, since the question runs to November 30, but it would mean the APEC stage was not the venue after all.
The Kim number is the mirror image. A Trump-Kim meeting would be the first in nearly seven years, since their encounter at the Korean demilitarized zone in June 2019, and it would need three things that are all currently missing: a venue, an agenda, and Pyongyang's consent. Trump floated the idea himself on October 13, saying of a meeting during his Asia trip that "I may" and "that'll be exciting," and aides were reported to have been instructed to pursue a summit as early as the autumn. Then, on October 19, he lowered expectations himself, saying "I don't know" and "I'm not sure that anybody's asking for a meeting." North Korea, meanwhile, has repeatedly said it will not surrender its nuclear weapons, which is the one condition Washington cannot waive. Rubio's October 31 remarks fit that pattern exactly: open in principle, empty in practice.
My own number for a Trump-Putin meeting by November 30 is 70 percent, below the market's 82 percent. The gap is not a disagreement about the direction of travel; it is a discount for the things that are still unconfirmed. Putin's attendance in Shenzhen is assumed, not announced. The format is unsettled, somewhere between a formal bilateral and a few words in a corridor. And there is a real, if small, chance of a staged non-encounter, where both sides decide that a photograph together costs more than it buys. The broad definition of a meeting is what keeps me at 70 rather than lower: a pull-aside counts, and pull-asides are the easiest diplomatic product in the world to arrange.
If the meeting happens, the interesting question becomes what it produces. Rubio also said on Saturday that international interest is growing in a limited Black Sea ceasefire to protect grain and energy shipments, while remaining sceptical about a negotiated peace. A Trump-Putin exchange could be the place where that idea gets its first leaders-level hearing, or where the nuclear arms discussion Trump wants gets its first airing. If the meeting does not happen, that will be news of a different kind: it will mean either that Putin stayed home, or that the choreography failed, and the Ukraine track will go back to envoys and phone calls. Either way, November will answer this quickly, which is exactly what a prediction should do.