Getting Started

Kalshi is a federally regulated financial exchange that allows investors to trade directly on the anticipated outcome of future events. Kalshi’s markets cover a wide range of topics including economics, international affairs, media and entertainment, climate/weather, and public health. Because Kalshi’s market topics can be more specific than other instruments like stocks or bonds, investors can get direct exposure to the events and trends that they are interested in. For example, a Kalshi market on whether a certain free trade agreement will be signed can help retail investors get exposure to emerging markets and fluctuations in international trade.

Markets on Kalshi are called event contracts and traders use their opinions to make trades. Traders that think a new stimulus bill will pass by March will buy “Yes” contracts and traders that think the stimulus bill won’t pass will buy “No” contracts. The prices of each fluctuate based on supply and demand. If lots of people think that the stimulus bill will pass, the “Yes” contracts will become more and more expensive to buy; conversely, if many traders think that the stimulus bill won’t pass, the price of the “No” contracts will increase. When the market settles and the outcome is known, market participants that correctly predicted the outcome will profit. Traders don’t even need to wait until settlement to see a return: participants can also profit from market movement by closing their positions strategically to take advantage of price changes.

Investors can use Kalshi via a web platform or mobile app and trades on Kalshi are fully cash-collateralized, meaning investors cannot use margin on Kalshi’s markets. At Kalshi, we believe that event contracts can change the way investing works for millions of retail investors, and we are committed to offering our customers simple and engaging event contract markets.

An event contract is a new type of asset class that gives investors the ability to make trades on their opinions about a specific yes/no question. That’s why markets on Kalshi are structured as questions.

Investing in a Kalshi market means investing in your opinion about a particular topic, global event, or trend. Each market has two types of contracts, YES contracts and NO contracts, which cover each possible answer to the Yes/No question. As an investor, you buy contracts based on whether you believe the answer to the market question will be YES or NO. If you think that GDP will increase this quarter, you might buy a bunch of YES contracts for that market. Conversely, if you think that GDP will decrease, you would buy NO contracts. Each contract on Kalshi settles to $1 if your answer is right, and $0 otherwise.

Trading can be complicated.  If you wanted to protect yourself from Brexit happening, it would have involved lots of complicated analysis and careful planning. Until Kalshi, there was no exchange that you could use to invest directly in the Brexit outcome. Instead, you would have had to analyze hundreds of companies to try and figure out which might be affected by Brexit, and then buy or short the stocks of those companies. Even if you tried to use existing derivatives like currency futures, you would have had to build a sophisticated understanding of how currency rates are affected by trade and other Brexit-related variables.

With Kalshi, you don’t have to do any of that. For a Brexit market on Kalshi, you would have had to simply decide whether you thought Brexit would or would not happen and then buy either “Yes” or “No” contracts accordingly. If your prediction had been right, you would have generated a profit. The power of Kalshi lies in its ability to give investors protection against the volatility of the future. Whether you want to put your money where your mouth is, or you want to be safe from unexpected events, Kalshi is a simple, quick, and intuitive way to express your beliefs!

We created Kalshi because of the many inefficiencies and problems with the current financial system.  How do you hedge the risk of climate change? How can retail investors profit from growth in emerging markets? How can peace in the Middle East impact American businesses? For far too long, these questions have only been able to be answered indirectly and investing in their outcome has been a long and complex process. Kalshi promises to change the way investing works: your opinions matter and you should be able to generate a return when you’re right. That’s why at Kalshi, we truly believe that event contracts have the potential to change the world.