Disclaimer: This article is intended for international audiences
A few years ago, economics classrooms or political forecasting circles were some of the few places you were likely to hear the phrase ‘prediction market’. Now you can find one advertised during an NFL broadcast or embedded directly inside a news app you already check every morning. And it’s no niche hobby: according to Pew Research Center, combined monthly trading volume across the leading platforms climbed from under $5 billion, in September 2025, to roughly $24 billion by April 2026. It’s a habit millions of Americans have picked up almost without noticing. Part of that shift comes from clearer federal rules and part of it comes from plain curiosity.
The Numbers Behind the Boom
The growth didn’t happen quietly. Institutional trading volume on Kalshi jumped by 800% over six months, Reuters reported, as hedge funds and trading firms started treating event contracts as a legitimate asset class rather than a curiosity. Retail interest grew just as fast. Kalshi’s partnership with Robinhood, which began in March 2025, opened its markets to millions of funded brokerage accounts almost overnight and helped push Super Bowl-related trading past $1 billion. Robinhood now handles a large share of Kalshi’s daily trading volume and the two companies split a small fee on every contract traded.
You don’t need a finance degree to understand how that happened. In fact, it’s because you don’t need a finance degree, that it happened. Prediction markets have flooded the sector with cash, much of it from people with little or no experience in trading – cue more interest from the professionals, which in turn grew the market further.
The Odds Are Showing Up In Familiar Places
Prediction markets used to live inside their own apps. That’s changing fast. Kalshi signed a deal to become CNN’s official prediction market partner in December 2025 and struck a similar arrangement with CNBC days later. The CNBC deal folds real-time Kalshi data into its television and digital coverage, giving the platform another entry point into households that never went looking for a trading app. By April 2026, Fox News, Fox Business, Fox Weather and the Fox One streaming app had all agreed to fold Kalshi’s forecasts into their coverage, reaching nearly 200 million people monthly.
But most of that traffic isn’t even coming from traders, Kalshi itself says. Roughly seven in ten visitors check the platform’s odds without placing a trade at all; the remaining three in ten actually participate in the market. That kind of visibility means the odds shape how people read the news even when they never click “trade.”
How an Event Contract Actually Works
This is where prediction markets start to feel different from a typical sports bet. A sportsbook sets a price and takes the other side of your wager. Kalshi works more like a stock exchange. Users trade event contracts against each other rather than against the house. Each contract can be bought or sold at any point before the underlying event resolves.
If a “yes” position is trading at 40 cents, the market is essentially saying there’s a 40 percent chance the event happens; buy it correctly and it settles at a dollar, buy it wrong and it settles at zero. That structure appeals to people who already think in probabilities, whether they picked it up from watching injury reports or from trading stocks.
For readers who want to see how the platform works in practice, Sportsbook Review’s guide to the Kalshi promo code SBR35 explains the current new-user offer alongside the account-verification, funding and eligibility requirements. The guide lists a $10 minimum deposit and $25 in qualifying trades to unlock $35 in bonus funds. That kind of consumer-facing onboarding is another sign of how prediction markets are moving beyond specialist trading circles and competing for mainstream attention.
Prediction Markets Are Moving Beyond Retail Speculation
Mainstream attention is not coming only from sports fans. Financial firms are increasingly interested in event contracts because they can offer exposure to risks that are difficult to trade through conventional assets.
A company affected by weather, interest rates or government policy, for example, may care about the probability of a specific event rather than the price of a stock or commodity. That helps explain why hedge funds, market makers and brokerage firms are paying closer attention to prediction markets as potential trading and risk-management tools.
The arrival of professional participants also matters for ordinary users. Greater institutional involvement can deepen liquidity and tighten pricing in active markets, although it may also make those markets more competitive for inexperienced traders.
Sports Fandom Is Fueling the Surge
Sports remain the single biggest driver of activity on prediction markets. The 2026 World Cup accelerated that trend even further. Sportico reported that US prediction markets needed just a couple of weeks in July to match the entire industry’s volume from the previous month, a figure north of $20 billion, while Kalshi ran dozens of ads during live matches on Fox and Telemundo.
None of that happened in isolation. American interest in global soccer has been building for years – a shift that’s increasingly visible off the trading screen too, as US fans have started turning matchday tickets into full travel itineraries for Premier League (and thanks to teams like Wrexham and Birmingham City, also lower leagues). That appetite for wanting to be closer to the action and part of the atmosphere helps explain why trading on a live match has become so popular: it feels like a natural extension of being a fan, rather than something separate from it.
What It Means for Fans in the Philippines
The picture is less straightforward in the Philippines than in the United States. Kalshi now allows users from a number of countries outside the US to apply for accounts, subject to its geographic restrictions and local law. International users may be asked to verify their identity and country of residence, and available funding methods differ from those offered to US customers.
That does not mean every prediction-market product is automatically permitted in the Philippines. Local gambling, securities and financial-services rules still matter, and the regulatory treatment of event contracts is less clearly defined than it is under the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission framework.
For Filipino users, the practical question is therefore not simply whether a platform is accessible online, but whether the specific service and type of contract are permitted under local law and under the platform’s own jurisdictional restrictions.
Prediction markets aren’t going away. They’re not staying in their old lane either. Whether that turns out to be a genuine improvement on polling and punditry or just a new, faster way to lose money on a hunch is still being argued out in courtrooms and statehouses across the country. Those answers will decide how far platforms like Kalshi can expand from here. For now, the odds are simply becoming part of the furniture, whether you go looking for them or not.
ADVT.
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