The United States is in the throes of widespread gambling addiction. Sports betting ads have become practically inescapable, and smartphone apps have made it easier than ever to jump right in. Meanwhile, prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket have supercharged the trend, allowing anybody to place bets on anything from tomorrow’s weather to the date of an imminent military invasion.
Despite a soaring cost of living, millions of Americans are pouring billions of dollars into prediction markets. And as the Wall Street Journal reports, their winnings are incredibly meager: in fact, according to the paper’s sweeping analysis, the vast majority of users are left holding the bag for a tiny proportion of accounts being run by pros, insiders, and trading firms with access to far better information and statistical capabilities than your average person.
It’s a devastating reality highlighting the dire need for regulatory intervention as more than half of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. But we’re not holding our breath for any meaningful government rules, especially considering the Trump family’s strong ties to the prediction market industry.
The numbers paint a dire story. Per the WSJ‘s analysis, a whopping 67 percent of profits on Polymarket go to just 0.1 percent of accounts. In other words, just 2,000 accounts made almost half a billion dollars since November 2022.
A Kalshi spokeswoman conceded to the newspaper that there are 2.9 unprofitable Kalshi users to each profitable one.
Betting on prediction markets has skyrocketed, rising from just $1.8 billion in April 2025 to $24.2 billion in April of this year.
It’s an extremely unbalanced system, with casual users often being outplayed by professionals and traders using algorithms to predict price movements at extremely fast speeds. Some use bots to make strategic bets tens of thousands of times a day, leaving recreational users out to dry.
Since there’s no “house,” like in a casino, users are only trading against other users. The vast majority of them eventually get hosed by a select few, while the platforms make bank by charging fees on trades.
Some topic are far more prone to casual users losing their shirt.
“You’re going to find that the easiest money is going to be in sports,” former professional poker player Michael Boss, who places 60 trades a minute on Kalshi, told the WSJ. “Sports has the attention of all the sick young men, I guess,” he added, referring to those addicted to gambling.
Other bets, like those on viral “mention markets,” or betting on whether a public figure will say a specific word, are even more dire. According to the WSJ, returns on them are worse than most Las Vegas slot machines.
The two prediction market platforms differ considerably in their approach. Kalshi is regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and has recently made a concerted effort to tamp down on insider trading.
Polymarket, which recently officially opened up to a limited number of US-based users under the auspices of the CFTC — circumventing geographic restrictions remains trivial through a VPN — has seemingly done little to address the issue, but claims to be cooperating with ongoing government investigations.
Meanwhile, 36-year-old CFTC chair Michael Selig, a long-time supporter of cryptocurrency markets, remains adamant that prediction markets are “technology that provides greater freedom to the American people.”
Nonetheless, the CFTC is still weighing its options for setting new rules for sites like Kalshi and Polymarket — which, considering the latest analysis, can’t come soon enough.
More on prediction markets: In Article About Horrific Shooting That Killed Eight Children, Forbes Lets Readers Place Bets About Gun Control
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