Published August 10, 2026 · edited September 5, 2026 · by Jake Hari
The Quick Answer
Three of the ten biggest open Kalshi markets can be traded on the headline alone. Four rewrite the ticket in the rules, and the worst of them is the most-traded contract on the exchange: the tech layoffs market, whose ticker names a strike its binding rule does not use. The reimbursement that protected traders caught in that gap closed in March. The board below grades all of them, with the clause behind every grade of C or worse.
Rules text, prices and volumes were pulled from Kalshi's public API on August 10, 2026. Every quoted clause is verbatim from the market's own rules tab as of that pull. New to event markets? Start with how Kalshi contracts work.
Which Big Markets Are Clean, And Which Are Not
An A means the headline is the contract. An F means the headline and the rules disagree on something that decides who gets paid. B through D sit in between, from a clause worth knowing before you size up to a rule most holders have never read.
Ranked by lifetime traded volume across open markets, one flagship market per event. Prices are the most recent traded prints as of August 10, 2026.
| Market | Volume (contracts) | Price | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|
| More tech layoffs in 2026 than 2025 | 31.4M | 91.6¢ | F |
| U.S. confirms aliens exist before 2027 | 26.8M | 6¢ | C |
| Citrini recession basket (3 of 5 before July 2028) | 25.9M | 19¢ | D |
| Los Angeles mayor: Nithya Raman | 14.3M | 33¢ | A |
| Fishback wins Florida GOP governor nomination | 14.1M | 1.6¢ | A- |
| Republicans win the House in 2026 | 12.7M | 16¢ | C+ |
| SAVE Act becomes law before Jan 4, 2027 | 11.3M | 5.6¢ | B+ |
| 2028 Democratic nominee: Gavin Newsom | 8.7M | 17¢ | B |
| California governor: Steve Hilton | 7.0M | 4.5¢ | A- |
| Bitcoin above $200K by 2027 | 6.8M | 4¢ | D |
| Trump out before 2027 (dishonorable mention) | 5.7M | 5.5¢ | D |
Why The Tech Layoffs Market Gets An F
The most-traded open market on Kalshi asks a clean question: "More tech layoffs in 2026 than in 2025?" The primary rule answers it with one number: "If there are more than 447,000 layoffs in the information sector in 2026, then the market resolves to Yes."
The ticker, though, is KXLAYOFFSYINFO-26-494000. The market was listed against a 2025 baseline of 494,000, and Kalshi's own secondary rules say that was wrong:
"This market was listed using an incorrect underlying value for tech layoffs in 2025. The correct floor strike is 447,000 layoffs, not 494,000 as currently specified. If the final layoff count falls between those two numbers, we will pay out $1.00 to all traders with an open position as of March 13, 2026 at 5:00 PM ET. Trades executed after this time are not eligible for reimbursement."
The reimbursement covers positions held as of March 13, 2026, and that window had been closed for five months at the time of this pull. Anyone trading off the number in the ticker is trading a strike that does not exist. If the final count lands between the two figures, the market resolves YES, and a NO holder who bought after the cutoff believing the bar was the higher number collects nothing.
The one-sentence primary rule also never names which official series counts the layoffs. Kalshi's series metadata points at the FRED layoffs-and-discharges series for the information sector, but the rules text leaves the source unnamed. Every word of this is published on the market's own rules tab. The full anatomy of the listing is in our tech layoffs market breakdown.
The Ds: Three Markets Whose Rules Rewrite The Ticket
The Citrini Recession Basket Has A Title Nobody Can Parse
The third-biggest open market on the exchange has a title that reads, in full: "Will the number of unemployment rate exceeds 10% (monthly BLS); S&P 500 declines more than 30% from its closing level on Issuance; Zillow Home Value Index declines more than 10% YoY in any of: NYC, LA, San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix; labor share of gross domestic income (GDI) first-release value for any quarter falls below 50%; CPI-U (All items, not seasonally-adjusted) YoY falls below 0% in any monthly release during before July 2028 be above 2?"
That is not a transcription error. The listing concatenated five recession indicators into one headline and asked whether the count "be above 2." The rule itself is coherent once you find it: YES if at least three of the five conditions occur in any data release published before July 2028.
A trader has to reverse-engineer that from the title, and the legs hide their own fine print:
"S&P 500 declines more than 30% from its closing level on Issuance"
The decline is measured from the index's close on the day the market was issued, not from any high. If the S&P runs up and then falls hard from its peak, that leg may still not trigger, because the drawdown is anchored to a fixed historical print. Traders who read "S&P falls 30%" as "a bear market happens" are trading a different contract than the one listed.
The series-level settlement-source field for this product, as returned by Kalshi's API, reads "The Source Agencies are" and then stops. Each leg does name its underlying series in the rule text, which is what keeps this out of F territory.
Bitcoin $200K: The Title And The Rule Disagree By A Day
The headline: "Will Bitcoin be above $200000 by Jan 1, 2027 at 11:59PM ET?" The primary rule: "If the Bitcoin spot price according to the CF Bitcoin Real-Time Index is above $200000 starting 2025-10-10 and before Jan 1, 2027 at 12:00 AM ET, then the market resolves to Yes." The title promises the end of January 1. The rule stops at the midnight that begins it, and the market's own expiration timestamp agrees with the rule.
The second clause is stranger. The secondary rules describe the resolution value like this:
"The resolution value is calculated by taking all BRTI values for each minute from market issuance until the specified time on the target date, removing the top 20% and bottom 20% of values, then averaging the remaining 60% of values."
The same paragraph also says the market "immediately resolves" if the index crosses the threshold at any point. Those two sentences describe different contracts. A one-touch market pays the moment the index prints above the line. A trimmed mean throws away the top fifth of every reading, which is exactly where an afternoon spike would live. On a ticket whose entire value is the spike scenario, that ambiguity is the trade. Our panel's read on the underlying probability is on the Bitcoin $200K verdict board.
Dishonorable Mention: "Trump Out Before 2027" And The Death Clause
This market sits just outside the top ten, and it is the cleanest live example of a carveout. The headline reads like a simple exit market: YES if Donald Trump leaves office before January 1, 2027. The secondary rules first widen the trigger, so that "an announcement that the President will leave the office within the next year is also encompassed by the Payout Criterion." Then they carve out death:
"If Donald Trump leaves solely because they have died, the associated market will resolve and the Exchange will determine the payouts to the holders of long and short positions based upon the last traded price (prior to the death)."
In the exit scenario that dominates most holders' mental model of this ticket, the contract does not pay $1. It settles wherever the market was trading before the news, so a YES holder who bought at 5 cents collects roughly 5 cents. The same clause family shaped the Khamenei exit markets and is standard across this product line. The headline price is not measuring what most buyers think it measures.
The Cs: Broader Than They Sound
"Will The U.S. Confirm That Aliens Exist" Covers Microbes
The second-biggest open market resolves YES if before 2027 "the President, any member of the Cabinet, any member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or any US federal agency definitively states that extraterrestrial life or technology exists."
Two gaps earn the C. The headline word is "aliens," and the mental image is intelligent visitors, but the rule covers any extraterrestrial life. On the text, a federal agency announcing conclusive evidence of ancient microbial life in a Mars sample qualifies. The second gap is "definitively states," which is doing unquantified work: officials have made striking statements about unidentified phenomena for years without any of them counting as definitive. The rules also define "Cabinet" expansively, sweeping in the EPA Administrator, the CIA Director and the UN Ambassador. A 6-cent price on a question whose settlement bar lives inside one adverb.
House Control Settles On Media Consensus, Or On One Person's Party Card
The House market reads like the simplest question in politics: "Will Republicans win the House in 2026?" The fine print names its judges, in order:
"This market may be determined early based on a consensus of media calls projecting control of the U.S. House. … Otherwise, victory will be determined by the party identification of the Speaker of the House on February 1, 2027."
The fast path is a consensus of media projections, a judgment about coverage rather than certified seat counts. The backstop is stranger: absent that consensus, the market settles on the party of whoever holds the gavel on a specific day, not on which party won more seats. Speaker elections are no longer formalities; the January 2023 election ran to 15 ballots.
In a narrow House, a prolonged Speaker fight or a compromise Speaker turns "who won the House" into "who was Speaker on February 1," and those are not always the same question. The grade stays at C-plus because in most outcomes the two agree, and the early-call mechanism is disclosed in the rules summary. But a 16-cent contract on the Republican side is partly a bet on parliamentary mechanics the headline never mentions.
The Bs And As: What Clean Fine Print Looks Like
SAVE Act becomes law before Jan 4, 2027 (B+). The rule matches the headline: YES if H.R. 22 becomes law before the deadline, and "becomes law" is a well-defined event, signature or veto override. The only blemish is cosmetic. The secondary rules field contains the unfilled template header "|| Additional Info ||" and nothing else. It costs traders nothing.
Gavin Newsom for the 2028 Democratic nomination (B). The rule adds one word pair the headline omits: YES if Newsom "wins and accepts the nomination." A candidate can be the presumptive nominee for months without being the nominee; the market pays on the convention, not the coronation. The same clause sits under every name on the 2028 Democratic nominee board. Worth one grade step, nothing more.
Los Angeles mayor, Nithya Raman (A). "If Nithya Raman wins the 2026 Los Angeles Mayoral Election, then the market resolves to Yes." That is the whole primary rule. No carveouts, no clock games. The headline is the contract, and every other grade on this page is measured against it.
Fishback for Florida GOP governor nominee (A-) and California governor, Steve Hilton (A-) are nearly as clean. Both settle on a well-defined public event, the nomination and the election respectively, and both disclose their early-close mechanics up front. The California market can settle "after a consensus of media organizations project the winner," the same device the House market uses, disclosed plainly. Half a grade off for leaning on projection consensus rather than certification, which has almost never mattered and occasionally has.
The Bottom Line
Trade the title only where the grade says you can. Everywhere else the clause quoted above is the contract, and the biggest market on the exchange has already shown what trusting a ticker over a rule costs. None of this is an allegation of bad faith: every clause here was published before anyone traded a contract, and exchanges write fine print because edge cases are real. Grades change when Kalshi corrects a listing. A rules edit on an open market is bigger news than any grade, and it belongs on this page.
Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated event-contract exchange open to eligible U.S. users 18+ (18 and older), and availability varies by state as of August 2026. Books on several markets covered here are thin, with wide spreads; the executable price can differ meaningfully from the last print quoted above.
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