Feature · Kalshi data
Kalshi's New Stock Market Has Traded $1.75 Billion. Most of the Trades Are Small.
Kalshi's stock perps track share prices nearly around the clock. Most trades are small enough for almost any brokerage account, while a small group of large trades moves nearly half the money.
Traders have bought and sold $1.75 billion of stock perps on Kalshi, a US-regulated exchange, since Nov. 5. The perps are contracts that track a share price nearly around the clock. The typical trade was about $200.
Kalshi's stock perps let anyone bet on a stock at night, on Sundays and with borrowed money. The first week's records suggest everyday investors are taking up the offer, in small amounts.
The range is wide. At 9:19 p.m. Eastern Time (ET) on Wednesday, hours after Wall Street closed, one trader swapped $258,467 of NvidiaNVDA-3.56% in a single trade. The next morning, someone traded 59 cents of PfizerPFE−1.75%.
- Kalshi stock perps traded since launch
- $1.75 billion All stocks and funds, through Thursday afternoon
- Typical trade, past day
- About $200 The middle trade, leaving Nvidia aside
- Money in trades of $10,000 or more
- 44.5% Past day, all stock perps
- Trading while the stock market was shut
- About 39% Since launch
The count
Most trades are under $1,000
Kalshi does not say who its customers are, but its public records show the size of every trade. The latest day shows small trades far outnumber large ones. Over the 24 hours to 3:38 p.m. ET on Thursday, its stock perps recorded 152,790 trades worth $195.2 million.
Nvidia's count needs a caveat. Nearly 30,000 of its trades were almost the same size, each worth less than $100. A pattern that regular suggests an automated program rather than people.
Leaving Nvidia aside, 77% of trades were under $1,000. Together, those small trades added up to 14% of the money.
The money
A few large trades carry the weight
At the other end, trades of $10,000 or more were 4.1% of the count. They carried 44.5% of the dollars.
Kalshi's data does not name those larger traders. They could be wealthy individuals, or firms that quote buy and sell prices all day so that smaller orders can fill.
Either way, the small trader is the crowd while larger players set much of the price. The table shows how that mix looks stock by stock.
| Stock | Traded since Nov. 5 | Trades, past day | Typical trade, past day | Open positions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nvidia | $329.7 million | 79,961 | $73 | $4.70 million |
| SpaceX | $281.3 million | 8,032 | $420 | $4.59 million |
| Micron | $270.1 million | 5,257 | $445 | $0.49 million |
| Sandisk | $114.4 million | 4,366 | $983 | $0.04 million |
| Costco | $109.7 million | 4,594 | $88 | $0.47 million |
| Alphabet | $101.7 million | 2,311 | $587 | $0.53 million |
| Tesla | $89.6 million | 2,092 | $304 | $0.79 million |
| Exxon Mobil | $82.1 million | 1,749 | $333 | $0.06 million |
The clock
Four in 10 dollars trade while the stock market is shut
The other draw for an investor with a day job is the clock. About 39% of all trading since launch happened outside the stock market's weekday session.
Kalshi's stock perps reopen at 6 p.m. ET on Sundays, and that first Sunday evening brought $156.6 million of trades. Kalshi's rules hold the reference price at the last official close until the stock market reopens.
Even so, the busiest hour of the past day was 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. ET, around the opening bell. It saw $48.9 million change hands, a quarter of the day's total.
The risk
What borrowing does to a small trade
Small trades can still carry big risk. Kalshi lets traders borrow on these perps, currently up to about 5 times their deposit on many stocks. At that level, a $500 position needs about $100 of the trader's own cash.
The same borrowing cuts the other way. A drop of less than 20% can wipe out that deposit, and Kalshi closes the position before the loss gets that far.
For comparison, a regular stock margin account lets a buyer borrow up to half the price of a share, about 2 times their own money.
Next
What to watch
Whether small traders stay is the open question. Open positions in Kalshi's stock perps stood at $16.3 million on Thursday, up from $8.2 million after the first day. Most money still turns over within hours, as a day's trading runs about 12 times what is left open.
The next test is Friday, Nov. 20, after a second full week. If open positions keep growing, more of these small traders are holding their bets instead of trading in and out.