These two college students 100x’ed their initial investment

Have you ever daydreamed about leaving the 9-to-5 grind to take a stab at full-time trading?

As someone who gets paid to encourage people to trade (please click here and trade), I just want to say one thing: DO NOT QUIT YOUR JOB AT THE UNDERWEAR FACTORY! YOU NEED THE INSURANCE!

Look, I want you to trade (Dew it!). It pays for my kids’ toys and my wife’s Wellbutrin. But most people (you included) probably aren't cut out to do this full time. That’s why I haven’t interviewed you.

But I did interview two Kalshi users named Eric and Jerry, because they’re the exception to the rule.

After interning at top trading firms, these two Big Ten students put their Computer Science and Computer Engineering degrees to work, and began trading on Kalshi’s weather markets full time. They even rented office space on campus. And after months of trial and error, they managed to make a 100x return on their initial investment.

I caught up with the recent grads to talk about how they beat the odds, what sets them apart from other traders, and how sometimes even technology is no match for a veteran prediction market pro.

Trade at your own risk. Not financial advice.

Kalshi: So, you all met in college, right?

Eric: Yeah. We started this around September of last year, at the beginning of our senior year.

Kalshi: How many of you were there in total?

Jerry: It started with just the two of us and eventually became three. In January we added a friend who's a really talented developer who built additional infrastructure. He's less involved now.

Kalshi: How did you first hear about Kalshi?

Eric: I studied Computer Engineering and Physics. But we both interned at trading firms. And if you're into markets, you're always looking for places to learn more or practice for fun.

A lot of people play online poker to sharpen trading skills. But I thought Kalshi was interesting because there were a lot of different things being traded, and it had a good API where I could pull historical data. So I started trading.

Kalshi: How did that go?

Eric: This was back in February 2024, before the election markets and stuff. I looked on the platform and saw a lot of people trading weather contracts. I did some research, convinced myself I had a bit of an edge, and promptly lost about $1,000.

Kalshi: As a college student, that's not a small amount, right?

Eric: Not a small amount for anybody, but it hits you harder when you're in college. I pulled out all my money and thought, "Fuck this, I'm not looking at it again."

Kalshi: What made you decide to try again?

Eric: Jerry and I became closer friends that semester, and worked on some projects together. After the summer, around September, I saw that Kalshi's weather contracts were trading at much higher volume. We took a look and decided this was an opportunity.

We also noticed some very obvious inefficiencies. We looked at the prices and immediately thought, "This doesn't look right."

Jerry: He texted me saying, "People trade on these weather contracts," and I replied, "How deep can it be? Just put a thermometer outside, it's not that deep."

Then it turns out it was that deep. The temperature can vary even a couple of meters apart; different sensors can give different readings. To get the actual number took a lot of work for us to price it well.

Eric: But that's the fun part. If we put in the work, there's a reward we could potentially earn from Kalshi.

Kalshi: I know you don't want to give away specific trade secrets, but generally, how were you able to gain an edge?

Jerry: We think we have one of the best systems among Kalshi traders. It allows us to scale into a lot of different markets with fairly high volume. With our meticulously designed execution strategies, we can implement trades you couldn't do just by clicking on the platform.

Eric: The main thing we do differently is using the API and automation. There are many successful traders on prediction markets, but a lot of them execute through the web interface. There are some good API traders too, but they are fewer and far between. That was the opportunity we targeted. Since we study computer science and computer engineering, and like to think we're good at coding, that's the avenue we went down.

Kalshi: It's my understanding that you actually rented out a space at your university to do this?

Jerry: Yeah. We rented a nice co-working space on campus.

Eric: It had a private office inside it.

Jerry: The three of us were basically working nearly full-time.

Eric: That last semester I had actually finished my required classes, so I wasn't taking any classes. All my time was spent on this.

Kalshi: Now that you're out of school, where are you trading now?

Eric: We're actually together in an Airbnb in Chicago now, still trading.

Kalshi: What kind of volume have you traded on Kalshi overall?

Eric: All-time, we've traded around $30 million in volume on Kalshi.

Kalshi: If you don't mind me asking, how have you done overall?

Eric: We started with a very small amount of capital, each of us put in the same small amount. We've made over 100 times what we started with. It was tough in the beginning not having much capital, but it grew aggressively.

Kalshi: That's impressive. Have you expanded beyond the weather markets, or is that still your primary focus?

Jerry: We have expanded.

The nature of those markets is that if everyone is there to make money, so the people who make money stay and the people who lose money leave. So we recognized early on that volume in weather contracts would die down as losers left.

We knew we had to expand into other markets, into areas where people have more varied opinions.

Eric: Markets with more disagreements.

Jerry: Yeah, more disagreements in a market means higher volume, and higher volume means more opportunity for us. So we haven't traded weather contracts in a while.

Kalshi: It sounds like you're primarily acting as market makers, rather than trading on outcomes. Is that fair to say?

Eric: Yes. Most of the time we're providing liquidity as market makers. But we do try to take positions and express opinions at times. We're getting better at that, but it's hard. We're going up against people who've been in prediction markets since the old days (PredictIt, InTrade). So we do lean into our opinions occasionally, and we're often wrong, resulting in some large down days. But it's a learning process.

Our main strategies revolve around providing liquidity. That's where our tech investment gives us an edge over many others on the platform. Of course, we're still tiny compared to big firms like Jane Street or SIG,

Kalshi: But essentially, you're still doing the same kind of thing they are, just on a smaller scale.Eric: Yeah. Whatever people want to trade, we just want to be there.

Kalshi: What are some examples of non-weather markets you've traded in recently?Eric: We've done a lot in sports. We traded throughout March Madness and the NBA playoffs. We're always long on the Pacers; big, big, big Haliburton fans, here.

For one-off events, we try to prepare in advance. We traded basically every Oscars market this year. One particularly fun market was Trump's address to Congress.

We traded on how many times certain words would be mentioned in that speech, and that was really interesting. Another interesting one was the PGA Tour markets.Jerry: Basically, any market with high volume over the past year, we've probably been involved in it.Kalshi: So the subject matter itself doesn't really matter to you, you're mostly chasing volume and volatility.Eric: Exactly. We look for volume, disagreement, volatility — generally any situation where there's a lot of trading activity.Jerry: Even if you're not a market maker, if you're an opinionated trader, high volume can be good because disagreement means you might find more edge compared to the market price. Your opinions are more valuable if more people want to trade on the other side.

Kalshi: What has been your biggest win so far? Your best day or best trade?Eric: One of our biggest days was in the weather markets. A couple of days before Thanksgiving last year, it was a crazy day.By early evening, we were already up a lot just from market making and our general strategies. Then we ended up in a position where we had bought a bunch of long-shot temperature contracts very cheaply. Basically, we would profit if the temperature at multiple airports went up around 7 or 8 PM, which is unusual since temperatures usually drop in the evening.Surprisingly, that's exactly what happened. We had positions in Austin and Chicago, and both locations reported a higher temperature around 6–7 PM. Trading went crazy after that. That day we made around $24,000.

Kalshi: Wow.

Eric: It was a really fun day. It was also a really long day. I was at my computer the entire time, waiting to see if those temperatures would tick up. I was about to call it quits at one point; I started shutting down some systems and was ready to turn off our strategies.

Then I heard a notification, looked back, and everything was going crazy. I ended up staying for another hour.Kalshi: At least you were well compensated for your time!

Eric: Yes, definitely worth it.Jerry: There was also the Masters tournament. Rory McIlroy was leading up until near the end. I'm not a huge golf expert, but another golfer started catching up and they ended up tied, going into a playoff. They kept playing extra holes until someone won.Eric: There were two contracts (one for each golfer) and people were trading them like crazy. The market pricing got pretty inefficient in the chaos. The volume was insane.At one point, about a million dollars traded in just five minutes between the two contracts. We were lucky to capture some edge from that.Kalshi: How much did you make on that day?

Jerry: Roughly $23,000.

Kalshi: On the flip side, what's been your biggest loss in a day?Eric: That would be another weather market.One of our dashboards showed a data point that wasn't real, and we traded on it. We took a large position because we thought we had an edge. It looked good. Unfortunately, it was too good to be true. We were making decisions on bad data. After about an hour, we realized we were completely wrong. We lost a bit over $20,000 that day.Kalshi: How did you react to that?Eric: Whenever something like that happens, we always review what went wrong. Even on our best days we look back and ask what we could have done differently or better. We did fix our systems after that misfire.In hindsight, even though we lost a lot, we still think it was an okay decision given the information we thought we had. We were relatively confident in the data at the time and we sized the position appropriately. It was a bad outcome, but we still believe the decision process was sound given what we knew.

Kalshi: Earlier you mentioned you liked Kalshi's API. What makes it a good API?Eric: It's very accessible. You can sign up and start making API calls to get market data almost immediately. The ability to pull historical data easily is huge, especially compared to traditional finance where getting data, like futures data from CME, can be expensive or difficult. With Kalshi's API, everything is just available.

Jerry: The developer community around Kalshi is great. For example, there's a user named Bumbling Bayesian who is an amazing API trader. When we first started, I ran into a problem and asked about it in the Kalshi Discord, he responded by sending me a whole PDF explaining some quirks of the API and how to work around them. That kind of community support is fantastic. No matter how good the official documentation is, you're going to hit snags, and having experienced community members willing to help makes a big difference.Kalshi: A good community definitely helps. I know some trading communities can feel like a viper's nest.Jerry: Absolutely. In some crypto trading Discords especially, it feels like most people are just trying to scam you. Kalshi’s community has been much more collaborative in our experience.

Kalshi: What other tips (BUT NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE) would you have for someone who's new to this or wants to get into it at a serious level like you guys? Any important lessons you've learned that others should know?Jerry: We took a pretty different route than many successful prediction market traders.Eric: People like Domer, Gaeten, and ZubbyBadger.Jerry: We don't exactly know how they operate, but it seems like they often put in a lot of time studying a single event. For example, Domer spent a ton of time researching the Papal market and made a big trade that paid off for him.But in our case, we spend a lot of time coding and developing systematic strategies, because we enjoy that. That might not be the best way to make money on event markets for everyone, especially given how the markets are right now.If you're just starting out, especially as a student, it might be more effective to deeply research a particular event or market where you think the odds are mispriced. Find a bet where the risk/reward is in your favor and focus on that.

Eric: And remember, trading on these markets is hard. When we first got into the temperature markets, we thought it wouldn't be too complicated. But then we spent six months learning, oh my gosh, just how complex it could be. Figuring out something as seemingly simple as the temperature at a specific weather station in Central Park got extremely deep. We were wrong plenty of times and got burned along the way, but we learned a lot each time.Some of these markets might seem silly or trivial at first glance. Like, how hard can it be to predict an Oscar winner or the next Pope?The amount of knowledge other users have is very non-trivial. You're up against some very smart, very informed people. So being humble and willing to learn from mistakes, constantly refining your approach, and not being overconfident, those are big advantages.

Kalshi: You mentioned the difficulty of trading against knowledgeable traders. Have you run into any trouble with this?Eric: Yeah, it was funny, but back in December, I was market making in a Spotify market on Kalshi. Suddenly someone started taking the other side of my orders in really large size. I was like, "What could this guy possibly know? Everyone else thinks the price is here." So I kept trading, thinking there was no way I was missing something.A few minutes later, I saw a tweet from Gaeten about his position on one of those markets. It turned out he was the one trading against us. He basically ran us over in that market.Kalshi: That must have been a terrible feeling, realizing he was on the other side.Eric: Yeah, it wasn't great! We managed to exit the positions, at a worse price than we entered, of course. But at least we didn't get completely wiped out.

Kalshi: It's easy to get overconfident if you win a few early on. You might just get lucky and then think you know everything. And then a guy like Gaeten comes along.Eric: Exactly. Even for us, if we make money on a trade, we try to ask ourselves if it was actually a good bet or just luck. You could win on a coin flip that you paid 60 cents on the dollar, but it was still a bad bet. So we try not to get high on our own success without evaluating whether our decisions were truly sound.

Kalshi: Is there anything else you want to add about your experience with Kalshi?Eric: We really believe in the potential of prediction markets. Kalshi already has significant volume, and if it grows even more, we want to be ready to capitalize when prediction markets go big.

Follow Terry Oldreal on X: @realOldTerryFollow Kalshi on X: @Kalshi

The opinions and perspectives presented in this article belong solely to the author, who is using a pseudonym and cannot trade on Kalshi, as well as the interviewees. This is not financial advice. Trading on Kalshi involves risk and may not be appropriate for all. Members risk losing their cost to enter any transaction, including fees. You should carefully consider whether trading on Kalshi is appropriate for you in light of your investment experience and financial resources. Any trading decisions you make are solely your responsibility and at your own risk. Information is provided for convenience only on an "AS IS" basis. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. Kalshi is subject to U.S. regulatory oversight by the CFTC.