Last updated: August 25, 2026, 11:55 PM ET. This page is the live hub for our commodity coverage.
Kalshi commodity markets ask a question most trading products refuse to ask simply: will oil, gold or copper finish the day above a specific price, yes or no? As I write this, late on the night of Tuesday, August 25, the board has already turned the page: Tuesday's six ladders are done, and Wednesday's six are posted: 250 contracts across oil, gold, silver, copper and natural gas, none of their settlement prints due until Wednesday afternoon. An overnight board like that is the most honest version of these markets you will see: maximum uncertainty, full distribution on display, nothing resolved. This page explains what these contracts are, what is trading right now, and the one structural quirk that separates a commodity ladder from every weather ladder on this site. That quirk changes what "diversified" means here, and we will get to it.
The Quick Answer
Kalshi commodity markets are daily, CFTC-regulated event contracts that each ask whether a commodity such as WTI crude, gold or natural gas will settle above a stated price on a stated day, paying $1 if yes and $0 if no, with the price in cents reading directly as the market's implied probability. The live board, the nested-ladder math that makes commodity prediction markets unusual, and the risk most new traders miss are all below.
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These are market prices and model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice.
What A Commodity Event Contract Is
Each contract on the board is one yes/no question: will this commodity settle above a stated price on a stated day? It pays $1 or $0 against a named public settlement source, and either side is tradeable. You can buy yes or buy no; there is no house line to beat, only other traders. If you are new to the format, how prediction markets work covers the mechanics from the ground up, and how Kalshi prices convert to odds covers the translation.
The price is the probability. A contract trading at 6 cents is the market saying roughly a 6% chance. Compare that to a sportsbook: a standard -110/-110 line at DraftKings or FanDuel bakes in roughly a 4.8% overround, about a 4.5% hold on the money wagered, posted prices differ book to book, and turning a price into a true probability takes de-vig math. All of that is why line shopping and odds comparison tools exist on the sports side. An exchange removes the translation entirely: one order book per contract, and the no-vig probability is simply the price on the screen, with Kalshi's per-trade fee charged separately rather than baked into the price. We unpack the deeper differences in exchange vs. sportsbook.
The third piece matters most for this page: these are short-lived contracts. Most of the daily ladders post at around 5:00 AM Eastern the day before they resolve and run about 36 hours to the close; WTI posts earlier still and lives closer to two days. Either way, that is a completely different instrument from the long-dated markets on the same underlyings, where capital sits committed for months. A daily oil contract is a one-day question about one settlement print.
New to OddsShopper? The de-vig math this section just walked through is the entire product on the sports side: OddsShopper Pro scans every major sportsbook and surfaces the no-vig fair probability on every sports market, so price-versus-probability becomes a reflex before you ever open a commodity ladder. OddsShopper Pro includes a free week trial, and code PMCOMMODITY20 takes 20% off your first payment of OS Pro or OS Core after it.
The Commodity Clock: How The Board Turns Over
Board snapshot, taken 11:55 PM ET on Tuesday, August 25: Tuesday's ladders are finished — WTI stopped trading at 2:30 PM ET, the other five by 5:00 — and the six ladders for Wednesday, August 26 are open and trading: Brent crude, copper, gold, natural gas, silver and WTI crude, 250 Wednesday contracts in all, with Thursday's WTI board already posted on top of them. Nothing on Wednesday's board has resolved: the futures session that will produce its settlement prints has been running for hours, but none of its questions are answered until the prints land Wednesday afternoon.
The commodity clock is worth learning, because it is not the weather clock and it is not the sportsbook clock. These daily ladders close between 18:30 and 21:00 UTC — WTI stops at 2:30 PM Eastern, in line with the futures settlement it tracks, and the other five run until 5:00 PM Eastern. The trading day ends mid-afternoon, not at midnight, and the next day's board is already posted before the current one closes, so for most of the day two boards overlap. A late-night snapshot like the one above catches the board at its widest point: every economic release, inventory report and headline of the coming day is still ahead, and the ladder prices carry all of that uncertainty inside them. By the next mid-afternoon, the same board has collapsed into answers. That cycle is what this page exists to explain.
One more structural read before the quirk, because the board itself teaches it. Each ladder's rung spacing is matched to how its commodity moves: Wednesday's natural gas ladder runs 70 rungs at half-cent steps, copper runs 50 rungs at two-cent steps, gold and silver run 40 rungs each at $10 and 25-cent steps, and the two crude ladders are coarser — 30 rungs of WTI and 20 of Brent, both at 50-cent steps. Finer steps mean the market is carving the day's range into thinner probability slices. Hold onto that picture — many slices of one number — because that is exactly where the quirk lives.
How A Commodity Ladder Works, And Why It Is Not A Weather Ladder
Here is the promised quirk. A commodity ladder is a set of nested thresholds: Above $80.00, Above $80.50, Above $81.00, and so on up the board. Nested means the rungs contain each other. If the settlement price lands at $80.70, every rung below it, both the $80.00 and $80.50 questions, resolves yes together.
Compare that to a weather ladder, where the bands are mutually exclusive: the high temperature lands in 82-83 or in 84-85, never both, so at most one band hits. The two ladders look identical on screen. Structurally they are opposites.
Nesting forces a shape onto the prices. Because a higher strike can only resolve yes if every strike below it also does, prices must decline as the strike rises. A ladder where Above $81.00 costs more than Above $80.50 is offering an arbitrage once the gap clears Kalshi's per-trade fee, and it gets corrected fast. That declining curve is not decoration; it is the market's implied probability distribution for where the commodity settles. Reading it is a skill, and our general primer on reading a Kalshi ladder is the place to build it.
A Worked Example: One Ladder In Round Numbers
The numbers below are round illustrations chosen to show the shape, not live quotes; commodity prices move on real events daily, and any concrete level would be stale by tonight.
| Contract | Price (yes) | Implied probability |
|---|---|---|
| Above $80.00 | 60¢ | 60% |
| Above $80.50 | 38¢ | 38% |
| Above $81.00 | 22¢ | 22% |
| Above $81.50 | 9¢ | 9% |
The most useful row is not any single rung but the gap between two. Subtract adjacent rungs and you get the market's probability for the band between them: 60 minus 38 says the market prices a 22% chance the settlement lands between $80.00 and $80.50. The ladder is a probability distribution wearing a price list as a disguise. And notice what a settlement at $80.70 does: the $80.00 and $80.50 rungs pay together, the $81.00 and $81.50 rungs lose together. Nothing on one ladder resolves alone.
The Risk Shape
That "together" is the risk lesson of this whole page. Positions spread across many rungs of one ladder are not diversified. They share a single underlying move and they resolve as a block. Twenty strikes on one ladder is one opinion about one number, not 20 opinions.
The second piece of the shape: selling an unlikely outcome collects a small premium and risks most of a dollar. That is a short-volatility position, many small wins punctuated by occasional large losses, and one loss can cost more than a long run of collected wins. The asymmetry is the shape of the trade, not a malfunction of it. We wrote up the general version in the asymmetric payoff problem.
Now recall the clock from the board section above. A contract that lives a day and a half has no time to average anything out. Energy in particular moves on scheduled inventory reports and unscheduled geopolitical headlines, and a daily contract can be repriced entirely by a single one. The short life is what makes these markets clean, and it is also what makes them sharp-edged.
Our Book, And Why It Is Not On This Page
We trade these markets, and that fact belongs on this page. It is also nearly all we will publish about it: no live orders, no position counts, no running tally — the same stance our weather desk takes on the sister hub, because a permanent page is the wrong place for a scoreboard and a stale record is worse than none. Graded, settled outcomes are the only kind we ever report, and they live in the Weekly PM Market Brief on the boards the panel actually scores, not on evergreen explainers.
What this page can give you instead does not depend on any record: nested rungs resolve as a block, so one ladder is one opinion about one number — size it as one bet, however many rungs you split it across. A reader who holds onto that, and the band subtraction that goes with it, is ahead of most people trading these markets. That is this page's job.
Learn More
This hub anchors our commodity coverage, and new commodity guides will be linked here as they publish. The Kalshi fundamentals below carry over directly:
- How do prediction markets work, the from-zero explainer
- Reading a Kalshi ladder
- Kalshi weather markets, the sister vertical and the structural contrast to this one
- Kalshi's fee structure, which matters more on daily contracts than long-dated ones
- Is Kalshi legit? for the regulatory background
One note on what this page is not: it contains no picks and recommends no trades, here or ever. If picks are what you came for, our free expert picks cover sports daily; commodities are a market we explain rather than tout.
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Disclosure
Stokastic Inc. trades these markets and holds positions in them. We have no affiliate or commercial relationship with Kalshi; we do carry sign-up offers for some other prediction-market and betting platforms, and any page comparing Kalshi to a platform that pays us discloses that relationship on the page. Kalshi commodity contracts are CFTC-regulated event derivatives traded on a designated contract market, not sportsbook wagers, and they can lose their full value. 18+, available where Kalshi operates; risk of loss is real and, on short-volatility positions, individually large. Nothing here is trading advice.
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