Neil Mehta

Kalshi and Polymarket have pitched themselves as this everyman's platform, where anyone can monetize their beliefs and win.

But what they don't mention is that you'll probably lose.

Kalshi and Polymarket have pitched themselves as this everyman's platform, where anyone can monetize their beliefs and win.

There's this one ad on Kalshi that features a young woman who said she was about to not be able to pay her rent, but then made a bunch of money on Kalshi.

And the message from these ads is that you too can win.

But what they don't mention is that you'll probably lose.

So on Kalshi, based on data from the past month, there's three losers for every single winner.

And on Polymarket, around 70% of users have lost money.

But on top of that, on Polymarket, two-thirds of all of the profits on the site have gone to just a tenth of a percent of users.

analyzed 35,000 mentioned markets on Kalshi and saw that on average, when you bet yes on an event that has a 50% probability, it'll only pay out around 40% of the time.

And if you do what most casual bettors do and just put your money on yes at the first price that you see, you'll lose 11% of your money on average.

Those returns are worse than what you'd see on the average slot machine in Las Vegas.

We spoke to a 33-year-old line cook from Detroit named John Peterson.

John got into a car accident and couldn't work, but he still needed to make money.

So he took out a loan and began betting on calci instead.

At first, he did pretty well.

He was betting on sports and weather markets and turned $2,000 into $41,000.

But then he took a big bet on a mention market.

He bet all of his money that the rapper A$AP Rocky would say the word rapper on The Tonight Show.

And technically, A$AP Rocky did end up saying the word rapper, but the version of his interview that got broadcasted cut that part out.