Logan Sudeith, 25, estimates he clocks about 100 hours a week on prediction markets.
Evan Frost for NPR
hide caption
toggle caption
Evan Frost for NPR
Ask Logan Sudeith how many bets he places in a week and he’ll laugh. It’s a comical line of questioning for the 25-year-old former financial risk analyst, who estimates he clocks about 100 hours a week on prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket. After a while, understandably, some of the bets blur together. What are his net profits, though? That’s a number he’s got at the ready.
“Last month, I made $100,000,” said Sudeith, who does most of his trading from his laptop while bed-lounging in his Atlanta apartment. He’s executing so many orders on the sites, he says, that he has no time to cook. So he DoorDashes every meal.
“My last salary was $75,000 a year, so I left my job to trade full time,” he said
Some of his biggest hauls in recent months include lucrative stakes on Time Magazine’s person of the year ($40,236), the most-searched person on Google last year ($11,083) and a wager on the New York City mayoral race ($7,448). And of course, a couple thousand here, a couple thousand there on questions like, how many times will a sports announcer say “air ball”? And will President Trump use the phrase “drill baby drill” at an upcoming press conference? (Traders had $500,000 on the line on this market.)
“I’m not a fan of Trump, though I do spend most of my day listening to him and tracking what he is doing,” said Sudeith, noting that whatever candidate in the next presidential race is the most friendly to prediction markets has his vote. “I could be a single-issue voter. If they’re super-super heavy anti-prediction markets, it would be hard for me to vote for them.”
Sudeith says he made $100,000 last month on prediction market apps.
Evan Frost for NPR
hide caption
toggle caption
Evan Frost for NPR
The boom of online prediction markets is being driven by the Sudeiths of the world. He’s one of millions of traders logging on every day to services like Kalshi and Polymarket to place high-dollar and incredibly risky bets on the outcome of the world in real time, whether it’s an award host’s turn of phrase to the number of migrants the U.S. will deport this year.
Much like previous financial crazes around meme stocks and NFTs, true believers view prediction markets through a stick-it-to-the-man prism. It’s a movement against the elite establishment, they say, whether it’s the mainstream media, pollsters or government agencies. This growing group of renegade traders maintain that core truths emerge only after thousands of people express their opinions with their pocketbooks.
“Markets are the most efficient way to get to real information,” Sudeith said. “If you’re watching on election night, I think you’ll know who the winners are before the news can report it.”
While the industry may position itself an alternative to the mainstream, the mainstream is embracing it.
CNN and CNBC have struck deals to incorporate Kalshi prediction markets into coverage. The Wall Street Journal‘s owner, Dow Jones, is partnering with Polymarket, as did the Golden Globe awards this year, with announcers updating viewers on Polymarket odds before every commercial break.
Founders of the prediction markets apps say they enable people to turn their opinion into a financial hedge against things like inflation or a government shutdown, yet skeptics say that is twisty and self-serving logic.
“They are gambling sites no different than FanDuel or DraftKings, a corner bookie, or a casino in Las Vegas,” said Dennis Kelleher, chief executive of Better Markets, a nonprofit that pushes for Wall Street reform.
Kalshi says ‘there’s no house,’ not all agree
Traditional gambling often means wagering against “the house,” where the casino acts like the banker, extracting fees and maintaining a competitive edge.
Prediction markets like Kalshi say they’re different.
Advertisements by the company Kalshi predict a victory for Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral election before the polls closed on Nov. 4, 2025.
Olga Fedorova/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
Olga Fedorova/AP
Here’s how they work: A staff member creates “a market,” often after one has been suggested by a user, like what will President Trump say at his next Oval Office briefing?
Then anyone can propose a “strike,” the lingo for a term that’s being bet on, whether, for instance, Trump will say “Greenland,” or “Minnesota,” or some other word or phrase.
Kalshi staff pick what terms will be bet on for both sides of that “yes” and “no” wager.
In order to work, however, there needs to be money on both the “yes” and the “no” side of the market, so Kalshi relies on institutional partners, like the hedge fund Susquehanna International, or everyday users with large enough portfolios to front the cash. This is called being a “market maker.” Kalshi provides financial perks and data access to traders who do this.
But because traders are competing with other traders, Kalshi argues there is no house involved in these transactions.
Several federal lawsuits against Kalshi have challenged this notion, claiming that the Wall Street firms that Kalshi taps are indistinguishable from a traditional “house.”
One suit filed this month in the Northern District of Illinois highlights that the company itself has a separate entity, Kalshi Trading, that supplies cash on the opposite side of trades.
“Thus, Kalshi users are betting against the house exactly the same way it would in a brick-and-mortar casino,” wrote lawyer Russell Busch in the complaint.
Kalshi denies this. Company spokeswoman Elisabeth Diana told NPR that market makers merely price bids and asks and do not have a competitive advantage.
“Market making is completely different from being a house, because a house has monopoly pricing power, whereas market makers compete with thousands of other market makers to take bids,” she said.
The Trump family invests in prediction markets. The administration is taking a friendly policy stance
While the Biden administration sought to rein in this industry, Trump’s regulators are breaking down barriers to allow it to flourish.
More than $2 billion is now traded every week on Kalshi, an amount the company says is 1,000% higher compared to the Biden years.
Polymaket, which was forced in 2022 to shut down in the U.S. for operating as an unlicensed betting site, recently won the Trump administration’s blessing to re-launch in the U.S.
The Trump family is also getting in on the action. The president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., is on the board of Polymarket, and his venture capital firm invests in the company. He is also a “strategic adviser” to Kalshi. Truth Social, the president’s social media site, is planning to launch its own prediction market called Truth Predict.
Donald Trump Jr. speaks during The Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas on May 27, 2025.
Ian Maule/AFP via Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Ian Maule/AFP via Getty Images
The explosive growth and permissive regulatory environment has ignited a debate about the underbelly of an industry that essentially turns many features of modern life into potential monetary wins and losses. Fears persist that when elections, politics and foreign invasions become a gamble that insiders could abuse their access for profit and market odds could influence what actually happens.
Then there’s the most prosaic, but perhaps more immediate worry: That the prediction markets gamify trading with slickly designed apps, one-click checking account deposits and constant push alerts, catering to compulsive online bettors. They’re not unlike other app-based trading platforms, but now almost anything is a potential betting opportunity, which economists and other financial experts say can enable a new generation of gambling addicts.
While individual bets on Kalshi are not public, the app has a leaderboard showcasing top profit winners.
That offers hope to some traders who turn to Discord and Reddit to discuss how losses have set them back.
“I’m down 2000 this week when I was up 1200 last week,” wrote a Kalshi trader who goes by Educational_Pain_407 on Reddit. “Lost it all and keep trying to claw it back. So I don’t know what to tell you but right now I don’t have enough to pay my bills in my bank account so I can’t bet even if I wanted to.”
There are three federal lawsuits against Kalshi seeking class action status alleging the apps have sucked young traders into gambling addiction.
Officials at Kalshi have said if traders “lose their shirt that’s on them,” and even the Reddit user behind on his bills concedes it’s a matter of personal responsibility: “Live and learn and pay for your mistakes. The consequences of being an adult,” he wrote recently.
While online sportsbooks and gambling are nothing new, the rapid speed, volume of cash and ease at which transactions flow across prediction market apps set them apart from other forms of betting, according to legal and financial experts.
“Like sports betting, these platforms can be addictive. It is the adrenaline rush that the target demographic is chasing,” said Melinda Roth, a visiting professor at Washington and Lee University’s School of Law who studies prediction markets. “I do believe this is a looming public health crisis.”
Decoding the lingo: ‘Mogged,’ ‘Fudded,’ ‘PMT’
Evan Semet, 26, is another diehard prediction markets trader who left his salaried position in finance as a quantitative researcher after he started raking in six figures a month on Kalshi.”I don’t feel the need for another job at the moment,” he said.
His first golden ticket came via bets on the number of Transportation Security Agency screenings that happen across a certain period on Polymarket.
Evan Semet quit his job in finance to do prediction market trading full time.
Meredith Nierman/NPR
hide caption
toggle caption
Meredith Nierman/NPR
Semet said he set up a dedicated server through Amazon Web Services to host statistical models that he runs to help him decide where to place bets.
“It was pretty modelable,” he said, noting that he leans on the finance savvy he gleaned at a trading firm to make money on predictions. “Most day traders draw some shapes on a chart and think it has some statistical significance but it’s really just astrology,” he said. “They’re old-school gamblers going off of intuition. I try to be driven by statistics.”
To stay tapped in, he’s often toggling between multiple live trades on one screen and following a discussion among other traders on the social network Discord.
Keeping up on what’s happening there requires understanding a hyper-specific type of lingo that’s a blend of Generation Alpha and Gen Z slang, repurposed finance terminology and a grab-bag of other cultural influences from gaming to crypto to the gutter humor of fringe sites like 4chan.
If you’ve been out-maneuvered by another trader, you’ve been “mogged.”
If a market has “fudded,” people are selling their positions out of fear, uncertainty and doubt. A “rulescuck” is someone who is a stickler for the rules of a betting market and will try to win on a technicality.
A “bondsharp” is a well-known community member who frequently puts up money on the other side of a bet.
These are just a handful of the terms required to stay apace of the chats on Discord, where PMTs are often discussing their full port (prediction market trader, and full portfolio, of course).
“It is a good amount of terminology. It’s borrowing lingo and terms from stuff I’ve heard at real trading firms mixed with online pop culture,” Semet said.
“Sometimes I prefer to not look at all and see how I did later,” Semet said.
Meredith Nierman/NPR
hide caption
toggle caption
Meredith Nierman/NPR
Prediction market trading can be a compulsive sport for many of them, who admit they can be dopamine junkies. Others prefer to avoid the pressure-cooker feeling of watching a bet win or lose live.
“It’s an antsy, gambling-like feeling watching it all happen live,” Semet said. “It’s intense, almost feels like the fog of war, trying to decide what to do,” he said. “Sometimes I prefer to not look at all and see how I did later.”
How predictions markets got into politics
Kalshi’s big day came, as it were, on Election Day in November 2020.
That’s when they got word that Trump’s Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates futures contracts, greenlit it as a “designated contract market,” a blessing that essentially gave the platform a license to operate as a financial exchange.
It was a long time coming.
For years before that, Kalshi’s co-founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara, former Wall Street traders who met at MIT, had been battling a skeptical CFTC, which had long rejected similar applications over concerns that an events contract platform would operate a type of gambling outside the purview of state gambling commissions. Regulators also feared the bets invited insiders to rig the outcomes of events from sports to elections.
Tarek Mansour, (left) and Luana Lopes Lara are co-founders of Kalshi.
Alexey Yurenev/Bloomberg via Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Alexey Yurenev/Bloomberg via Getty Images
As Kalshi hired lawyers and lobbyists leading up to their CFTC approval, another prediction market, where most are betting with cryptocurrencies, Polymarket, was exploding in growth. It, however, had not bothered to even try to receive federal buy-in. The Biden administration shut down the exchange for operating without a license. Now, Polymarket has the CFTC on its side, and is staging a U.S. comeback.
Two developments helped Polymarket’s return: the company acquired a little-known derivatives exchange QCX, which had already obtained CFTC approval. And the Trump administration’s CTFC and Justice Department abandoned investigations into Polymarket.
States, however, are on the attack. Massachusetts has sued to push Kalshi out of the state. Eight other states, including New York, New Jersey and Maryland, have sent the company cease and desist letters alleging that it is operating as an illegal and unlicensed sports gambling site. The motivation is clear: Gambling brings in serious tax revenue for states, while prediction markets bring in none.
For both Kalshi and Polymarket, one of the most controversial areas of prediction market trading is elections, an issue Biden-era regulators took Kalshi to court over.
Under the 1936 Commodity Exchange Act, which was updated in 2008 after the financial crisis, future event contracts cannot involve terrorism, assassinations or “games,” but political betting is not explicitly banned.
The Polymarket prediction market website is seen on a computer screen.
Wyatte Grantham-Philips/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
Wyatte Grantham-Philips/AP
Biden administration lawyers argued that placing wagers on races amounted to a game, a word that is not defined at all in the law. Election bets, the regulators contended, could turbocharge the spread of political misinformation and create financial incentives for voters to cast a ballot even when it’s contrary to a voter’s political views.
It also puts the CFTC in the awkward position of having to investigate news, whether real or fabricated, that moves a prediction market. Former CFTC officials told NPR that the agency has never been equipped to be “an election cop.”
The federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. rejected that framing and handed Kalshi a major victory. The court also pointed out that the harm these markets would cause the government was not “concrete” enough.
The Trump administration dropped the appeal, unleashing what is expected to be an unprecedented torrent of prediction market cash into this year’s midterm elections, which is raising alarms among those pushing for stricter regulations on this industry.
“AI, deepfakes, and other nefarious activities to attack candidates could easily impact the betting activity and odds, as well as the actual outcome of elections,” said Kelleher of Better Markets. “They don’t really care who wins or loses. They only care about the volume of bets and driving that volume as high as possible.”
Regulators appear unprepared. The CFTC usually has five commissioners but currently only has one. Meanwhile, Kalshi’s board includes former CFTC Commissioner Brian Quintenz, who was among the officials who gave the platform its federal approval in 2020.
Former CFTC Commissioner Kristin Johnson, who left the agency in 2025, said that lack of commissioners comes on top of high levels of turnover among the most senior staff lawyers.
“We’re essentially asking the CFTC to get involved in engaging and policing an element of our democratic process that we really haven’t thought carefully enough about,” Johnson said.
Insider trading scrutiny grows
Before a U.S. operation ousted Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, one trader on Polymarket banked a nearly half-million-dollar profit on a bet Maduro would not remain president for long.
While the trader’s identity remains a mystery, speculation continues to rattle around the internet about whether the person had insider information. The episode has renewed scrutiny on how the companies ensure bets aren’t rigged.
On Discord, when traders see a large bet placed that immediately stands out as an outlier, cries of “the market is insidered” are common. Proving it is another matter.
As is often the case on the platforms, open-shut evidence of insider trading is elusive. Kalshi requires a government-issued ID to sign up in order to trace any possible market manipulation back to a real person. Polymarket does not, but it has yet to publicly re-launch its U.S. app. Internal and third-party surveillance tools, the companies say, are on the lookout for unusual activity.
Congress has begun to take notice. Following the Maduro trade, Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-NY, and 30 other Democrats, sponsored legislation banning federal officials from using prediction markets to trade on policies or political outcomes using non-public information.
Being up against an insider is always a risk, said full-time prediction markets trader Semet.
“There’s always going to be someone who has more information than you, unless you’re the insider,” he said. “There are certain accounts that miraculously have every single Google and OpenAI release date nailed perfectly, and it’s like, all right, just don’t fade those people,” he said using the slang word for voting against another trader.
Being up against an insider is always a risk, said full-time prediction markets trader Semet.
Meredith Nierman/NPR
hide caption
toggle caption
Meredith Nierman/NPR
When asked if he thinks Kalshi and Polymarket are doing enough to combat insider trading, he gave a blunt assessment: “F*** no,” Semet said. “I really don’t think they care.”
“Tailing,” or making a bet joining in on a suspiciously large bet is common on the platforms. Bloomberg on Monday reported on a new tool that allows traders to get alerts when anomalous transactions occur so they can potentially cash in on what could be a winning wager.
From the vantage point of these traders, nearly everything has a trading implication.
And that kind of thinking can fuel conspiratorial theories about why something did or did not happen.
Take, for instance, a recent White House press briefing in which press secretary Karoline Leavitt left the room seconds before hitting 65 minutes. To most, that was unremarkable.
Yet on Kalshi, that looked like a secret message, because many thousands of dollars in bets were at stake that she would cross the 65-minute mark.
The chatter about Leavitt was mentioned on CNBC, which got the attention of traders on Discord, who wondered if this or another incident will ever lead to a PMT, prediction market trader, testifying in Washington about rigging the markets.
“PMT getting called before Congress,” wrote a Discord user, whose handle is “permanent resident of hell,” they added: “Let’s get a market on it.”
