When Troy Dixon first suggested incorporating forecast markets into the electronic trading platform he works on, he was met with disbelief. “People told us we were crazy,” Dixon, co-head of global markets at Tradeweb, tells WIRED. However, Dixon says that when the company announced it was working with Kalshi in February, the mood changed dramatically. “We were inundated with calls,” he says. “We have never seen customer feedback like this for any other announcement.”
Tradeweb, which is the majority owner of the London Stock Exchange Group, serves the time-honored financial world, including institutional investors such as pension funds and mutual funds, banks, hedge funds and insurance companies. While most of the public debate about prediction markets revolves around their sports offerings – there is a fierce legal war over whether they are really just sports betting companies – these platforms are also becoming popular among professional traders. Sophisticated investors are mainly interested in them because of the markets on topics such as election results, the war in Iran and the price of Bitcoin. Many of them view forecast markets as forecasting tools that can be used to make trading decisions. “We are very excited,” says Dixon. “It’s very rare that you have something this new and innovative.”
Kalshi, one of the two largest players in the industry, wants to strengthen cooperation with the world of finance. According to spokeswoman Elisabeth Diana, the company already sees billions of dollars in trading volume generated by institutional investors in markets in the climate/weather and science/technology categories. This week, Kalshi announced that it is partnering with XP International, a Brazilian financial services company. The agreement enables Brazilian clients to trade on financial and political forecast markets from Kalshi to XP. In a statement, Lucas Rabechini, XP Inc.’s chief financial products officer, called prediction market contracts “a new asset class.”
Prediction markets are currently regulated in the US by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency that oversees derivatives markets. While there is a growing, bipartisan tendency to classify events in the forecasting market as gambling, the CFTC maintains that these platforms do offer financial products.
For Kalshi, aligning with Wall Street may prove to be a shrewd strategy. The company faces a wave of lawsuits related to sports markets. Anything that highlights its usefulness in the world of finance will facilitate the company argue that it is not a hub for investing money in sports, but rather center of the future of finance. And while the immense majority of activity on the platform is still conducted by ordinary people (known in industry jargon as retail traders or click traders) trying to predict the outcomes of football matches and other sports competitions, there is also an increasing presence of professional traders.
Some of the biggest names in finance have already entered the world of prediction markets. In October 2025, Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the Modern York Stock Exchange, invested $2 billion in Polymarket, Kalshi’s biggest competitor. Jump Trading, a high-frequency trading company, has acquired shares in Kalshi and Polymarket in exchange for providing market making services to these companies. (Market makers buy and sell contracts instantly, which is crucial to the functioning of derivatives markets.) Susquehanna International Group, one of the largest market makers in the world, is currently the leading market maker in Kalshi. SIG also plans to launch its own forecast market offer in cooperation with the fintech company Robinhood and is staff recruitment in particular for trading on prediction markets. There are also many well-known brokerage houses serving major banking clients, such as Clear Street and Marex planning to soon provide customers with access to prediction markets.