As of September 14, 2026, at 2:23 AM ET, Kalshi's "How high will US gas prices get in 2026?" board gives the "above $4.60" rung 74¢ bid, 76¢ ask. When this page last read the ladder, on Thursday evening, September 10, the same rung was 61¢ bid, 65¢ ask, and the headline called a new 2026 high the favorite. It is now three in four. The move did not come in one afternoon this time. Friday's sellers knocked the rung down to a 50¢ print while crude fell, Saturday's buyers took it back to 60¢, and then between 7:44 PM Sunday and 1:47 AM Monday ET buyers lifted about 1,270 contracts in a straight line from 64¢ to 76¢, all but a third of a contract of it taker-bought.
The backdrop is on the record, and this weekend it ran in both directions. On Friday Brent settled at $104.61, down 2.8% on the day, after Iranian state media said Tehran would meet the Gulf states in Oman on Monday to discuss the strait, per CNBC; the same day Saudi Arabia's energy ministry shut the East-West pipeline, the kingdom's 4-to-5-million-barrel-a-day route around the Strait of Hormuz, after drone attacks launched from Iraq. Early Sunday an Iranian commercial ship was struck off Qeshm Island in the strait, killing one, and on Sunday Oman postponed the Monday meeting "to ensure appropriate conditions for constructive dialogue." When futures reopened, Brent was trading $107.54 in Asia, up 2.8% from Friday's settle, as this page read the board. AAA's Sunday national average for regular gas is $4.3130, up 16.6 cents in a week, and its diesel average set another record at $6.2040. The price history does not say which of those the buyers were reading. What it says is that a new 2026 high, priced at 42¢ on Wednesday, September 9, and a coin flip on Thursday morning, was priced at three in four by 2 AM Monday, and that the market has now run 25 to 27 points past the number a five-model AI panel put on this rung on August 3, when the rung cost 46¢. It has passed the panel's most bullish seat, too. That gap is what this page is for.
Most "gas price prediction" pieces hand you a single number and a vibe. Kalshi's board does something more useful: it turns the question into a ladder of yes-or-no contracts, each one paying out only if AAA's national average for regular gas climbs above a stated level at some point before the year ends. That structure lets you read the market's odds at every altitude at once, from a small new spike to a record-shattering melt-up. We fetched the live ladder, hid the prices from a five-model AI panel, and asked each model to score the whole distribution from scratch. The panel's numbers are frozen at its August 3 run so you can watch the market move around them.
The Quick Answer
The market ran past the panel, and then past the panel's bull. As of September 14, 2026, at 2:23 AM ET, "above $4.60" trades 74¢ bid / 76¢ ask, up from 61 to 65¢ at Thursday evening's read and 41 to 42¢ the Wednesday before, after a Sunday-night run of about 1,270 contracts, all taker-bought, from 64¢ to 76¢. Our panel, priced blind on August 3 and left untouched, had that rung at 49%; the market sat under it for five weeks, caught it Thursday morning, and is now 25 to 27 points above it, and above the 72% from DeepSeek V4, the highest number any seat put on the rung. "Above $4.80" is 41¢ bid / 42¢ ask, up from 38 to 40¢, and "above $5.00" is 32¢ bid / 35¢ ask, unchanged at the bid, so the step between the first two rungs widened from about 24 cents to about 33 at the mid. The panel has $5.00 at 20%. The other overnight story is a 4,788-contract sweep of "above $5.60" at 1:27 AM Monday, in one second, for about $947. The full rung-by-rung board, the weekend tape on the first rung, the sourced record from Friday's pipeline shutdown to Sunday's postponed talks, and that tail sweep are below.
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The Market
| Venue | Kalshi, a CFTC-regulated event-contracts exchange |
| Event Ticker | KXAAAGASMAX-26DEC31 |
| The Contract | A ladder of "Above $X" markets. Each rung resolves YES if AAA reports the maximum national average price of regular gas is greater than the stated level at any point from issuance through December 31, 2026 |
| Settlement Source | AAA's reported national average for regular unleaded gasoline, named in each market's own rules; a single day at or above a level settles that rung YES for the rest of the year |
| Why It Is A "Max" Market | Because YES only needs the level touched once, the live question is really: will AAA's average set a new 2026 high above each rung in the days that remain? |
| Closes | On resolution; the window ends December 31, 2026 |
Verify it yourself: the live ladder, its exact rungs, and the current YES prices sit on Kalshi's gas markets under event ticker KXAAAGASMAX-26DEC31, and AAA's live national average is published daily at AAA Gas Prices. Only AAA's reported maximum inside the 2026 window counts.
The Board
Here is the ladder in phone-friendly form. "Market (YES)" is the live Kalshi quote as bid and ask, as of September 14, 2026, at 2:23 AM ET; "AI panel blend" is the equal-weight mean of the five models after a revision round, its August 3 numbers unchanged. The year's high to beat is still $4.564, set May 21, and AAA's Sunday print is $4.3130, so the first rung is about 29 cents away.
| Will AAA's 2026 Max Top… | What it takes | Market (YES, bid–ask) | AI panel blend |
|---|---|---|---|
| $4.60 | 3.6 cents over the May peak | 74–76¢ | 49% |
| $4.80 | an 11% run from Sunday's print, no record needed | 41–42¢ | 32% |
| $5.00 | 1.6 cents under the 2022 record | 32–35¢ | 20% |
| $5.20 | the first rung that needs a new all-time record | 21–22¢ | 12% |
| $5.40 | clear the record by ~38 cents | 17–19¢ | 7% |
| $5.60 | far past any record | 15–19¢ | 5% |
| $5.80 | far past any record | 12–13¢ | 3% |
| $6.00 | a dollar past the record | 11–13¢ | 2% |
| $6.20 | — | 9–10¢ | 1% |
| $6.40 | — | 7–8¢ | 1% |
| $6.60 | — | 7–8¢ | 1% |
| $6.80 | — | 5–7¢ | 1% |
| $7.00 | more than double the pre-war base | 6–8¢ | 1% |
More live boards from the same panel: how high oil goes in 2026, where the $115-or-above WTI rung asked 28¢ at our last read · when the Strait of Hormuz reopens, where "normal traffic before January 1, 2027" traded 17 to 19¢ at our last read · the full graded scoreboard behind every seat below.
This time the first rung moved alone, and it moved at night. From August 31 through September 9, "above $4.60" closed between 40¢ and 45¢ every day; Thursday's session closed 60¢ after the 64¢ high this page reported. Friday gave some back: about 1,070 contracts were taker-sold while crude fell, and the session closed 58¢ with a 50¢ low. Saturday's buyers took it back to 60¢ on about 810 contracts bought. Then Sunday's session opened at 61¢, dipped to a 59¢ low, and closed at 71¢, and the first two hours of Monday took it to 76¢, so the daily closes now read 60, 58, 60, 71 for Thursday through Sunday, and the rung is quoted 74 to 76. The second rung barely followed: "above $4.80" is 41 to 42¢ against 38 to 40 at Thursday evening's read (it closed that session at 45¢ after later buying), and it printed as high as 50¢ and as low as 33¢ in between, on Friday alone. "Above $5.00" is 32 to 35¢, its bid unchanged from Thursday, after about 2,040 contracts of buying and 800 of selling that went nowhere.
Up the ladder the money went to two rungs. "Above $5.60" was the board's busiest market in the 24 hours to this read, with about 5,000 contracts, and almost all of it printed in one second: at 1:27:52 AM ET Monday a single sweep took 4,788 contracts across fourteen fills from 14¢ to 21¢, the largest 1,750 at 20¢, 1,000 at 20¢ and 884 at 21¢, for an outlay of about $947. It left the rung quoted 15 to 19¢, from 13 to 14 on Sunday afternoon, with its open interest only about 1,000 contracts higher than it was at midnight, so most of that sweep matched holders who were already in the market rather than adding new positions on both sides. "Above $7.00" kept taking buyers every day through the weekend: about 4,050 contracts taker-bought since Thursday evening at 6 to 11¢, for about $332, the largest two 587-contract lifts at 8¢ within 40 seconds of each other at 11:47 AM Saturday, and its open interest has grown from about 37,900 at Wednesday's close to about 43,600. The far tail keeps its thin-book wrinkles, with $6.60 bid level with $6.40 and $7.00 bid above $6.80. Treat tail cents as a spread, not a laser; the rung that matters is still the first one, but the pair I keep re-reading has moved down a step: it is now $4.60 and $4.80, where the book says a new high that clears the May peak by four cents goes on to clear it by 24 only a little better than half the time.
Every Seat's Number
The full panel, rung by rung. These are the round-two numbers, after each model read the others' anonymized reasoning and was free to revise.
| Threshold | Claude Fable | Claude Opus | Claude Sonnet | GLM 5.2 | DeepSeek V4 | Blend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $4.60 | 42% | 42% | 48% | 40% | 72% | 49% |
| $4.80 | 24% | 26% | 32% | 24% | 55% | 32% |
| $5.00 | 14% | 15% | 19% | 13% | 38% | 20% |
| $5.20 | 8% | 9% | 12% | 8% | 24% | 12% |
| $5.40 | 5% | 6% | 8% | 5% | 14% | 7% |
| $5.60 | 4% | 4% | 4% | 3% | 8% | 5% |
| $5.80 | 3% | 2% | 3% | 2% | 4% | 3% |
| $6.00 | 2% | 1% | 2% | 1% | 2% | 2% |
| $6.20 | 2% | 1% | 1% | 1% | 1% | 1% |
| $6.40 | 1% | 1% | 1% | 1% | <1% | 1% |
| $6.60 | 1% | 1% | <1% | 1% | <1% | 1% |
| $6.80 | 1% | 1% | <1% | 1% | <1% | 1% |
| $7.00 | 1% | 1% | <1% | 1% | <1% | 1% |
Per-seat cells are rounded to whole percents while each blend is the mean of the unrounded model probabilities, so a row may not average to its blend exactly. Model estimates generated August 3, 2026, 06:42 UTC, from a price-blind data card: each model saw the live 2026 AAA price path but never the market's prices. That August 3 run reached five of the eight seats we normally poll; ChatGPT, Gemini, and Kimi K3 were unreachable (an expired session, a missing local client, and a provider rate-limit), and their absence is disclosed here rather than hidden. Models are frequently wrong, and the market price reflects real traders' money.
Where The Panel Splits From The Money
This page has now read the same ladder six times, and Monday's is the first read where the market is above every seat on the panel at the rung that decides the page. On August 3 the market had "above $4.60" at 46¢ against the panel's 49%. On August 31 an early burst as high as 50¢ faded to 40¢ by mid-morning and the rung closed at 43¢. By Wednesday, September 9, it was 41 to 42¢, seven points under a panel that had not moved. Thursday morning touched the panel's number at 49 to 53¢; Thursday evening cleared it at 61 to 65¢. By 2:23 AM Monday it was 74 to 76¢, 25 points over the blend at the bid and, for the first time, over the 72% DeepSeek V4 put on the rung as the panel's bull outlier. The middle of the ladder did not keep pace. "Above $4.80" is 41 to 42¢ against the panel's 32%, about two cents better than Thursday; "above $5.00" is 32 to 35¢ against the models' 20%, its bid exactly where Thursday left it. So the market sits above the panel at all three bottom rungs, by 26, 10 and 14 points at the mid, and the gap at the first rung is now larger than the other two combined.
Nobody gets to ask an order book why it moved, but the price history shows what moved and when, and this time the work came at night. After Thursday's 64¢ high the rung closed at 60¢. Friday's first fills of size were sales: 76 contracts taker-sold at 57¢ at 12:59 PM ET, then 354 at 51¢ and 200 at 57¢ in the same second at 2:30:49 PM, and 77 more at 54¢ twenty seconds later, about 1,070 contracts sold on the day against roughly 600 bought, for a 58¢ close. Saturday was quieter and one-sided: 100 contracts bought at 55¢ and 199 at 56¢ within six seconds of 10:39 AM, 100 at 61¢ at 10:18 PM, about 810 bought against 90 sold, back to 60¢. Sunday afternoon added 150 contracts at 61¢ at 2:36 PM and a scatter of fills at 61 to 64¢ through 5:29 PM. Then at 7:44:58 PM ET one second of buying took about 300 contracts from 64¢ to 68¢ across 24 fills, the largest 90 at 68¢. At 9:31 PM another 150 went at 68 and 69¢; at 10:54 PM the first 71¢ printed. After midnight it kept going: 200 contracts at 72¢ at 1:07 AM, 73 at 74¢ at 1:16, 199 at 74 and 75¢ at 1:23, and at 1:47:40 AM a 29-fill sweep of about 327 contracts at 75 and 76¢, the 76 being the high print. From 7:44 PM Sunday to 1:47 AM Monday the rung traded about 1,270 contracts, all but a third of a contract of it taker-bought; the only sale since is half a contract at 74¢ at 2:04 AM. All told the rung turned about 4,710 contracts between our two reads, 3,290 of them bought by the taker, and 1,885 in the 24 hours to this read, against 849 on "above $4.80" and 1,097 on "above $5.00," so the weekend's money went to the first rung again, and this time the second rung did not get a share.
Here is what was on the record while that happened, and in what order. Thursday's items carry over: the $107.63 Brent settle, AAA's 13-cent week, the attacks on shipping around the strait. Friday added two things that pull in opposite directions. Per CNBC, Brent settled down 2.8% at $104.61 after Iranian state media said Tehran would meet the Gulf states in Oman on Monday to discuss the strait, still an 8.7% gain on the week. The same day, per NBC News, Saudi Arabia's energy ministry shut the East-West pipeline after drone attacks launched from Iraq; Al Jazeera reported the drones came from Iraq's Maysan province and hit the line in the Riyadh and Medina areas, and that the 1,200-kilometer route from Abqaiq to Yanbu carries 4 to 5 million barrels a day and has been the kingdom's way around the closed strait since March. "The key buffers that got us through the last six months have basically been worn away," analyst Ben Cahill told Al Jazeera. NBC added that Houthi forces had taken Perim Island in the Bab el Mandeb strait and the port of Mocha the same week, and quoted the Houthi line that navigation is safe "for all companies except for Saudi vessels." Early Sunday, per the Associated Press, an Iranian commercial ship was struck off Qeshm Island in the strait, one killed and four wounded; the U.K. Maritime Trade Operations monitor said "a vessel was hit by a projectile while transiting the strait," Qeshm's governor blamed a "terrorist enemy," and Washington had not commented. Then the diplomacy that had knocked crude down on Friday came apart. Oman's foreign minister, Badr Albusaidi, said Sunday that "the regional meeting scheduled to take place tomorrow in Salalah has been postponed until a later date to ensure appropriate conditions for constructive dialogue," per Gulf News, and an Iranian foreign ministry official, Mohammad Ali Bak, said the delay came "at the request of some regional countries" in a "joint decision by Tehran and Muscat." Al Jazeera noted that Muscat's July proposal would have split control of the strait 50-50 with voluntary shipping fees, and that Iran rejected voluntary fees and demanded compulsory ones. When futures reopened, Brent for November was up 2.8% at $107.54 in Monday's Asian session and WTI up 2.3% at $102.34, per the same Gulf News report. On the pump side, AAA's table shows the national average at $4.3130 on Sunday, 16.6 cents above a week ago and 24 cents above a month ago, with diesel at a record $6.2040. The first-rung buying began at 7:44 PM ET Sunday, less than two hours after crude futures reopened for the week and on the evening the postponement was announced; the timing overlaps, and none of it comes with a receipt naming a buyer. The honest sentence is that the market repriced a new 2026 high from three in five to three in four on the night the talks meant to manage the strait were put off, and that nothing on the price history says the one caused the other.
The pump side of the record, carried from Wednesday. AAA's Labor Day note, published September 3 with the average at $4.14, called it the highest gas prices ever for this time of year and said the average had never been above $4 on the holiday; the Labor Day record until this year was $3.82, set September 3, 2012. AAA named "continued volatility in the Strait of Hormuz" and crude in the $90-a-barrel range as the cause. Diesel has been setting records almost daily: Fox Business reported a $5.85 national diesel average on September 4, past the $5.8159 mark from June 2022, and AAA's own table now shows $6.2040 on September 13 as the highest diesel average it has recorded. On the crude side, U.S. Central Command said on the evening of September 8 it had destroyed five Iranian oil tankers, four in the Gulf of Oman and a fifth near Kharg Island, after attempted missile attacks on a U.S. Navy warship, while Houthi strikes on Saudi Arabia ignited fires at oil facilities and wounded 73 people across Abha airport, King Khalid air base and Aramco sites. Saudi crude output fell to 6.238 million barrels a day in August, down 1.9 million on the month and its lowest since 1990, per Trading Economics; the Strait has been closed in every way that matters since early March.
So the pump is up, crude is back up, and this time the first rung moved almost alone. The calendar is still doing work against it: 108 days remain in the window, and the panel's own math for why a rising price on a shrinking runway still struggles to print a new high was already on this page in August. Claude Opus put the mechanics plainly in the August 3 run (its "today" is that read's $4.095):
$4.60 is only 3.6c above the locked 2026 max ($4.564) but 12% above today's $4.095... $5.00+ requires a new ALL-TIME record (done once, 2022) [the record is $5.0165, so strictly the record threshold is the $5.20 rung. Ed.], so those rungs collapse fast; each 20c step above a record is a compounding tail. — Claude Opus
GLM 5.2, in the same August 3 run, added the detail that keeps even the lower rungs from running away: the initial war premium has already partly unwound once this year.
The current price ($4.095) is 47 cents below the May peak ($4.564), and the market has shown adaptation capacity — prices fell to $3.823 in early July despite the closure, suggesting the initial shock premium has partially unwound. — GLM 5.2
The Bull Case (Why The Rungs Could Hit)
AAA blamed crude in the $90-a-barrel range for the $4.14 Labor Day average in its September 3 note; Brent settled at $107.63 on Thursday after trading above $108, dipped to $104.61 on Friday, and was back at $107.54 in Monday's Asian session. A barrel is 42 gallons, so every dollar on crude is about 2.38 cents of gasoline feedstock before refining, taxes and retail margins, and the move from $90 WTI to Thursday's $102.48 WTI settle, about $12.48 a barrel, is about 30 cents of feedstock, just past the 28.7 cents between Sunday's print and the first rung, if it passed through in full, which it never does at once. Read the Monday quote against that arithmetic and the market has stopped discounting most of it: 74 to 76¢ for a rung the raw feedstock math would barely clear leaves the book charging only a quarter for the lag, the mid-September switch to winter blend and the chance the strait reopens before the pump catches up. That is the whole bull case in one line, and it has precedent: the national average rose about 53% from $2.98 on February 28, when Operation Epic Fury began, to the $4.564 May peak after Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz days into the war, and retail lagged crude the whole way up. Claude Fable is the clearest voice for why the near rungs stay live:
at sustained crude near $90 WTI a drift toward the mid-$4s is plausible without new news... the $4.60 rung sits just 3.6 cents above the May peak, so any escalation-driven retest clears it. — Claude Fable
The panel named the same accelerant beyond the war itself: the Atlantic hurricane season, which peaks August through October and is the main autumn threat to Gulf Coast refining. A major landfall on the refining corridor while the Strait stays closed is the scenario that would lift the lower half of the ladder fast. GLM named it as the single most ladder-moving piece of news to the upside. For now it is a possibility on the calendar, not a storm on the map: the National Hurricane Center's 2 AM EDT outlook on September 14 says there are no tropical cyclones in the Atlantic and none are expected to form during the next seven days, so there is still no storm on the map to bid. The callback the bulls will not like: the last time crude did this, in May, the pump needed weeks to follow, and at 74 to 76¢ the market is now charging three in four for a lag it was charging 42¢ for on September 9, a coin flip for on Thursday morning and three in five for on Thursday night.
The Bear Case (Why They Probably Do Not)
The bear case is now the market's minority view at the first rung, 24 to 26¢ of doubt against 74 to 76¢ of yes, but it is still the case above the record line, and its best evidence is this year's own tape. The average peaked at $4.564 on May 21 and was $3.823 by early July, a 74-cent unwind with the Strait still closed and the war still on; crude spikes have not had to stick at the pump in 2026. Since the August 3 panel run the pump has added 21.8 cents, 16.6 of them in the last week, and it still needs 28.7 more to reach the first rung, with 108 days left of the 150 the panel had. The calendar works against it too, since demand falls into autumn and refiners switch to cheaper winter-blend fuel from mid-September, so the real window for a new high is closer to the hurricane months than the full stretch on the clock. Claude Sonnet laid out why the upper ladder decays once a rung needs to beat the 2022 record of $5.0165, which is every rung from $5.20 up:
probability decays roughly geometrically, roughly halving every ~2 rungs, converging toward near-zero above $6.00 where it would require a crude shock well beyond anything seen even during the current war. — Claude Sonnet
There is a two-sided risk the bears lean on hardest. The same headline that could spike the ladder could also collapse it. Four of the five models named a Strait of Hormuz reopening or a U.S.-Iran ceasefire as the one event that would crater every rung at once, capping the average near current levels for the rest of the year. That is the risk Sunday night's buyers took on at 64 to 76¢: a rung that priced 42¢ of yes on September 9 now has 74¢ of bid to give back if a deal appears. This weekend's record cuts both ways on that: the talks that might have started one were postponed, and a postponement is not a cancellation. Notice too that the sibling board above priced "normal traffic before January 1, 2027" in the high teens at our last read: the market does not expect the strait to reopen inside this window, and until Thursday morning it still doubted the first rung.
Dark Horses The Panel Won't Dismiss
The steep decay does not mean the tail is dead. DeepSeek V4 was the panel's bull outlier, and it would not blink on the lower rungs, pricing "above $4.60" at 72% against the blend's 49%. Its reasoning was a supply-shock read: with the Strait closed and WTI in the $90s, it treats a retest of the May peak as its base case, not its tail. At the September 9 read the market sat 30 points under it; at Thursday's morning read the gap was 21 points; by Thursday evening it was 9. At 2:23 AM Monday, with the rung's mid at 75¢, the market is 3 points above it, the first read on which the market has passed the panel's bull.
The closed Strait of Hormuz sustains elevated crude, making a new 2026 high above $4.60 likely, but each step toward a new all-time record faces steeply compounding political and demand-destruction resistance. — DeepSeek V4
Even so, DeepSeek named the news that would blow up its own ladder, the same one the bears did:
a credible U.S.-Iran ceasefire agreement that reopens the Strait, which would collapse all probabilities by 50-80% overnight. — DeepSeek V4
The upper rungs are their own dark horse, and this week someone paid for one. On Wednesday afternoon, between 3:11 and 3:22 PM ET, about 2,672 contracts of "above $7.00" were lifted across seven taker-bought fills at 7 and 8¢, the largest a 1,341-contract print at 3:20 PM, for a total outlay of roughly $188. It was the busiest day on that rung in the two weeks of daily candles we pulled, and the rung's open interest rose by about 2,900 contracts on the day. Then on Thursday it happened again: 1,512 contracts of "above $7.00" were lifted in three fills at 6 and 7¢ between 2:10:37 and 2:11:06 PM ET, the largest a 782-contract print at 6¢, for an outlay of about $94. The weekend did not stop it, and the position is now the story rather than any one fill: five days of buying have taken about 8,230 contracts on "above $7.00" for roughly $610, and the rung's open interest has grown by about 8,600 contracts since last Tuesday's close, so this is new money staying in, not one trader rotating. A market that pays 6 to 8¢ for "above $7.00" is not saying $7 gas is coming; it is pricing the small, real chance that a direct strike on Gulf export or refining infrastructure stacks a second historic shock on top of the first, and about $610 of taker buying bought the right to roughly $8,230 if it does. Monday morning's $5.60 sweep, detailed in The Board above, is the same bet five rungs closer to the pump and at a very different price: an average of 19.8¢, about four to one against, on a rung the panel has at 5%, a one-in-twenty. That is a $5.60 national average, a dollar over the May peak and 58 cents over the 2022 record, and someone paid about $947 for the chance. Neither is the base case. But the panel does not zero those tails out either.
The Convergence Round
Claude Opus opened its August 3 read at 55% on "above $4.60" and trimmed itself to 42% after seeing the pack, calling one forecaster "too aggressive on a 12%-gap rung." By Monday morning the market had bought that exact rung to 76¢. Claude Fable went the other way, from roughly 38% to 42%, after seeing the others cluster higher. The net of those revisions is that four of the five seats finished under 50% on the first rung, and even DeepSeek, which held its 72% rather than fold, now sits under the market's mid. That is what the second pass is for: each model reads the others' anonymized ladders and may revise, and here it made the blend tighter and lower rather than wider, which is why a frozen 49% that read as the bull case in August is the number the weekend ran past. The graded scoreboard will say in January whether the four that converged were careful or just early.
How To Read This Board Like A Sharp
A running-max ladder has one rule the rest of the board does not: the prices have to fall as the rungs rise, because every higher rung is a subset of the one below it. Divide neighbors and you get the market's conditional odds. Today 41.5¢ into 75¢ says a new high that clears $4.60 goes on to clear $4.80 about 55 times in 100, down from three in five on Thursday evening, because the first rung keeps outrunning the second; 33.5¢ into 41.5¢ says a run that clears $4.80 goes on to clear $5.00 about four times in five, still too high for a path that turned at $4.564 in May, but a step down from Thursday's 85, because the round number's bid did not move while the rung below it gained two. At the quoted spreads you cannot harvest that gap either: 42¢ to get in on $4.80, 32¢ to get out of $5.00, a 10¢ debit before fees. It is a read on which quote is stale, not a trade. In May the average climbed to $4.564 and turned; nothing about that path says a run through $4.80 must finish at $5.00. Layer the volume on top, 849 contracts in a day on the rung that is supposedly four-in-five to be passed against 1,885 on the rung below it, and the sharp's read is that the weekend repriced the first step again and left the middle of the ladder where Thursday put it. None of that is advice to buy or sell any rung. It is the kind of thing a sharp notices and a headline reader does not. If turning cents into probabilities is not yet second nature, our guide to what a Kalshi price actually means walks through it.
The move a sharp makes next is to hold the market's number against an independent estimate and act only where the two diverge, and by Monday morning the divergence is the widest this page has recorded: the market sits 25 to 27 points above the frozen panel at "above $4.60" and 9 to 10 above it at "above $4.80," while it is still paying four-in-five odds for a $4.80-to-$5.00 handoff the price path has not earned, against a panel that puts that handoff nearer three in five. Watch the convergence honestly too: the panel did not get smarter over the weekend, the market moved through it on Thursday and past its most bullish seat on Sunday night, and a frozen 49% that read as the bull case in August is now the bear case by more than it was ever the bull. If you would rather start from someone else's homework than build your own read, OddsShopper's free expert picks show where sharp bettors are finding edges across sports today, and the full toolkit behind those picks starts with a free 7-day trial whenever you are ready to run the numbers yourself. For a very different board with the same running-max shape, see how the panel read how high Bitcoin can go in 2026.
Every number in this piece gets graded in public once the market settles, so you can check whether the panel or the market read 2026 better. You can follow the running tally on our full graded scoreboard.
To be explicitnothing here is advice to buy or sell anything. Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated event-contracts exchange, you must be 18 or older to use it where it is offered, and gas prices swing on events no model can foresee.
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- Pro Baseball Champion · $40M traded
- Bitcoin price at the end of 2026 · $30M traded
- 2027 Pro Basketball Champion · $19M traded
Every market above links to our full AI model verdict; browse them all on the OddsShopper prediction markets hub, and see how every settled call actually scored on the full graded scoreboard.
Prices on this page are Kalshi's book. If you also trade on Polymarket, code OS4 gets new users a $50 trading bonus on a $10 deposit — affiliate link; terms as stated by Polymarket; 18+, availability varies by state.
Hero illustration: OddsShopper, in the house collage style. Gas pump photo by Goose Green Photography, licensed CC BY 4.0; photo cropped, toned, and composited.
