Kalshi parlays accounted for 68% of record $3.7 billion Sunday volume

Parlays accounted for more than 68% of Kalshi’s record $3.7 billion in trading volume on Sunday, or about $2.5 billion, as the average combination grew to more than 10 legs from an average of six in May. The result extended a run in which the prediction-market operator set a volume record in every week of the new NFL season.

The headline volume was not the same as money staked. Gaming America, which derived the Sunday figures from Predict Charts data, put taker volume, the amount users staked, at a record $90.7 million, up from $83 million the previous Sunday.

Kalshi cut its minimum parlay price on Sept. 3 from $0.01 to $0.0001, or 0.01 cents. That floor equates to odds of +1000000. After the change, users lost a combined $4.6 million on combinations priced below $0.01, equal to 86% of the money staked on those wagers.

The pricing of long combinations has drawn scrutiny. The implied edge against bettors was about 2.5% on two-leg combinations, or roughly $2.50 per $100 wagered, but rose to about 25% for combinations with more than 10 legs. On parlays with more than 21 legs, bettors paid 44% more than the reported true value of their selections.

Kalshi has advertised itself as “a federally regulated exchange where you trade against other users” and says it is not the house. Yet most users cannot take the opposite side of a parlay trade, leaving market makers to fill that role.

InGame reported in September that website and app users could take only the Yes side of a parlay, while API users could act as market makers. Prices below 0.1 cents diverged sharply from probabilities implied by the individual legs, and no parlay with a leg-implied probability longer than one in 28,000 had won.

The practical trading floor often remained 0.1 cents for wagers beneath that threshold. The longest winning parlay by leg-implied probability was priced at 0.08 cents and had 15 soccer and baseball legs across nine competitions.

Low-priced combinations can inflate the platform’s reported volume because federal reporting rules count each contract as $1 in notional volume. Kalshi spokesperson Jack Such said the company’s notional-volume measure did not overstate activity and that people could look to other metrics if they preferred.

A CNBC analysis cited by RG found that combinations accounted for 58% of Kalshi’s September trading volume while making up less than 13% of its transactions. Separately, InGame calculated that takers had staked a little more than $112.5 million on parlays priced at one cent or less since June. Those trades generated $37.2 billion in reported volume, or 60% of Kalshi’s total over the period, while producing $11.7 million in fees, about 1% of fee revenue.

The shift has intensified comparisons with conventional sportsbooks, where parlays have historically carried higher margins than single-event bets. Citizens analysts Jordan Bender and Isabelle Slavin found Kalshi’s implied vig on a tracked 15-leg NFL combination was 26.4%, compared with 23.9% at DraftKings and 6% higher than FanDuel, before transaction fees.

The products are also central to legal disputes over sports-event contracts. A Connecticut judge cited parlays as having no economic value in ruling against Kalshi, while an Illinois judge ruled in the company’s favor the previous week. Michigan barred Kalshi from sports wagers in an order backed by a $500,000 daily fine, and Ohio ordered 10 prediction markets to stop offering sports contracts.