The Quick Answer
The Supreme Court decides its argued cases inside the term it hears them: the term opens on the first Monday in October, and the rulings (the biggest ones almost always last) land by late June. So "Supreme Court decisions 2026" really means two waves: the term that wrapped in summer 2026, and the new term opening October 5, whose rulings arrive from fall through June 2027. This year the calendar has a third layer, because the Court now has a prediction-market question on its own doorstep: on August 28 the Ninth Circuit held 3-0, at the preliminary-injunction stage, that Kalshi's sports contracts are likely sports bets a state can regulate, the opposite of what the Third Circuit held in April, and New Jersey filed a petition on September 2, a day before a court-set deadline, asking the justices to settle it. Traders price that too. Polymarket's order book (the global polymarket.com book, view-only in the US) paid 30.5 cents on September 4 for the Court taking a sports-contract case by December 31, after a round trip from 29 to 58 and back. Beneath all of it, just over a million contracts on Kalshi price the bench rather than the docket: WHO is confirmed as the next justice, WHEN a confirmation happens, and WHO LEAVES the Court. One rule runs through all of it: a price only means something once you know how its ladder is built. The circuit split, what each path means for sports contracts, the full boards, and the one coherence check that ties all of them together are below.
Stay ahead of the markets.
Daily insights and expert picks on Kalshi, Polymarket, and what's moving markets.
Free forever. Unsubscribe anytime.
When The Supreme Court Rules: The Term Is The Clock
Every question about Supreme Court decision dates has the same answer underneath it: the term is the clock. Arguments run from October into the spring, opinions are released as they are ready, and the backlog clears in a rush across the final weeks of June; the blockbuster rulings almost always arrive in that last stretch. An argued case is normally decided within the term it is argued in; the rare exception is set for reargument the following term or dismissed, not left hanging. Anyone waiting on a specific ruling in 2026 is really waiting on that clock: a trickle through winter and spring, then the flood before the summer recess.
The 2026 decision calendar, in shortargued October through spring, decided by late June, the biggest rulings last. The next term opens Monday, October 5, 2026 and runs to June 2027.
The end of a term does double duty, and this is the bridge into everything below. Opinion season is also, historically, when departures from the Court get announced: recent retirements took effect as a term closed, and several were announced in a term's final weeks. That makes June the natural month to watch the bench boards further down, and the ladder already prices it that way: the rung for a confirmation before June 2027 quotes a mid near 19.5 cents, the rung for before 2028 near 47.5, so roughly 28 cents of the market's probability sits in the seven months from June 2027 through year-end, a window that opens with the opinion season where term-end departures have historically been announced. That 28 is read off a wide book, as the ladder section explains. Anyone tracking the 2026 decision calendar ends up watching the same dates as the traders. The start of a term matters for a different reason this year. The first weeks of October are when the justices work through the summer's pile of petitions, and one of those petitions is about Kalshi itself.
Kalshi At The Supreme Court: The Circuit Split
Until the last Friday of August, the legal fight over whether a sports event contract is a federally regulated swap or a plain sports bet was messy but one-directional. On April 6, 2026, a divided Third Circuit panel in KalshiEX v. Flaherty held 2-1 that sports event contracts listed on a CFTC-registered exchange are swaps under the Commodity Exchange Act, and that federal law preempts New Jersey's gambling regulators from touching them. Judge David Porter wrote the opinion, joined by Chief Judge Michael Chagares; Judge Jane Richards Roth dissented. That ruling put an injunction between New Jersey's regulators and Kalshi's sports markets, with binding precedent behind them in Pennsylvania and Delaware, and it was the first federal appellate word on the question, unanswered until August.
On August 28, 2026, a three-judge Ninth Circuit panel in KalshiEX v. Assad answered the same question the other way, 3-0, in Nevada's favor. Judge Ryan Nelson's opinion put the holding in one sentence: "the substance of the sports event contracts offered on Kalshi's DCM is sports gambling, regardless of whether Kalshi calls them swaps." (A DCM is a designated contract market, the CFTC's term for a licensed exchange.) The panel reasoned that swaps exist to transfer financial risk, while these contracts "do not help institutions or investors hedge against risk; they create risk, largely for ordinary consumers, where none previously existed," and that Congress "did not take a wrecking ball to all sports gambling regulations built up over decades" when it wrote Dodd-Frank. Judge Kenneth Lee concurred separately, resting on the CFTC's own Rule 40.11, which bars gaming contracts outright. Two points keep the ruling in proportion: it is a preliminary-injunction decision about Kalshi's likelihood of success, not a final merits judgment, and it is specifically about sports contracts. The panel sent the separate question of election contracts back to the district court.
Two federal appeals courts, one statute, opposite answers: a circuit split, the single strongest reason the Supreme Court takes a case. The CFTC's spokesperson said as much the same day, calling it a "circuit split that calls out for resolution by the Supreme Court." Kalshi, through spokesperson Dani Lever, said: "Despite the Ninth Circuit's opinion, we still believe the CFTC regulations as written do not prohibit sports contracts, and in any event, the CFTC is working to clarify those regulations." Then the split did what splits do. New Jersey, the state that lost in the Third Circuit, had a September 3 deadline to seek Supreme Court review of that loss, and on Wednesday, September 2, Attorney General Jennifer Davenport and Division of Gaming Enforcement interim director Mary Jo Flaherty filed a 332-page petition for a writ of certiorari. Its question presented, verbatim: "Whether the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act preempted States from regulating sports bets that occur within their jurisdictions if those bets are offered on markets registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission."
Kalshi has its own clock on the Nevada loss. It has 14 days from the August 28 judgment, through September 11, to ask the full Ninth Circuit to rehear the case en banc. Or it can skip that step and petition the Supreme Court itself. Under the Court's rules that petition is due 90 days after the judgment, which lands on November 26 if no rehearing is sought. Attorney Daniel Wallach's read, published August 29: "The choice for Kalshi: Rehearing en banc or go straight to SCOTUS? Probably the latter here, especially after going 0-3 in front of three Trump-appointed judges." Appeals on the same question are pending in at least five more circuits, including the Second, Fourth, Sixth, Seventh, and Tenth, so the split can only get wider while the justices decide whether to step in.
What Each Path Means For Sports Contracts
The petition is about sports contracts, and so are all three paths from here. What changes on each one is who gets to say yes or no to a sports market, and where.
- The Court Takes The Case And The Third Circuit's View Wins. Sports event contracts on a CFTC-registered exchange are federal swaps, and state gambling law cannot reach them. Every cease-and-desist letter built on state gaming statutes loses its footing, and a sports market on Kalshi becomes a single national product rather than a state-by-state one. This is the outcome Kalshi has argued for from the start.
- The Court Takes The Case And The Ninth Circuit's View Wins. A sports event contract is a sports bet, and each state's gaming regulator decides whether it may be offered there, on what license, and to whom. Sports contracts would live under the same 50-state licensing map as sportsbooks, and the blocks already in force in Nevada and Washington become the template rather than the exception. The exchange keeps its federal license; the sports product line becomes a state question.
- The Court Passes, Or Takes Its Time. The map stays split by circuit. Kalshi's sports contracts remain protected by the Third Circuit's injunction in New Jersey, and by its precedent in Pennsylvania and Delaware, while the federal-preemption shield is gone across the nine Ninth Circuit states: Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington. Nevada's block stays, and so does Washington's geofence order; in the other Ninth Circuit states with no live order, nothing changes on its own, and what a regulator does next decides what the app offers. And every other circuit with a pending appeal gets to pick a side in the meantime.
Two things the ruling does not touch are worth saying plainly. It does not decide anything about the three bench markets further down this page, which are political-event contracts about who sits on the Court, not sports contracts; the closest question, election contracts, was sent back to the district court for more work. And it does not change the arithmetic of a sports price. The game markets at the center of the case are the same game markets we line up against the sportsbooks every day on the live odds screen, where you can shop the number across every major book. What the Court decides is who may sell you that contract, not what it is worth. Where Kalshi is legal, state by state tracks the map itself; this page tracks the prices around it.
The circuit split, in shortthe Third Circuit says a sports contract is a swap (April 6, 2-1); the Ninth Circuit says it is a sports bet (August 28, 3-0); New Jersey asked the Supreme Court to choose on September 2. If the Court takes it, the merits decide whether sports contracts are one national product or 50 state questions; a denial leaves the map split by circuit.
How Traders Price The Court Taking The Case
There is a market on this question too, and it is the cleanest possible test of the thesis this page was built on. Polymarket's global order book lists "SCOTUS accepts sports event contract case by...?" as a date ladder: one rung for a grant of certiorari (the Court agreeing to hear a case) by October 31, 2026 and one for a grant by December 31, 2026, with an earlier July 31 rung that already settled No. These prices are reported from polymarket.com, which US readers can view but not trade; nothing here is a recommendation.
| Rung | Yes price (cents) | Best bid / ask (cents) | Traded |
|---|---|---|---|
| Grant By Oct 31, 2026 | 5.5 | 4 / 7 | $1,774 |
| Grant By Dec 31, 2026 | 30.5 | 30 / 31 | $17,588 |
Polymarket order book read September 4, 2026 at about 10:15 a.m. ET. Bid = what a buyer will pay; ask = what a seller wants. Prices move constantly.
The row to stare at is the December one, because of where it has been. Between noon and 2 p.m. ET on August 28, the day the Ninth Circuit's opinion came down, that rung went from 29 cents to 55, closed the day near 58, and held between 50 and 53 through the weekend. It is the move the trade press reported on August 31: the chances "jumped from 29% to 52%" and "almost $1 million" had been traded. The first half of that is true. The second half needs the ladder's grammar: the event has traded about $980,000 in total, but $960,000 of it sits on the July 31 rung that already settled No. The December rung itself has traded about $17,600, with roughly $10,600 of liquidity behind the whole event. Then, with the petition actually on file, the rung gave the entire move back: 46 cents by the evening of September 2, 40.5 by the evening of September 3, and 30.5 when the book was read mid-morning on September 4, one cent above where it sat before the ruling.
My read, and it is a read, not a fact: Nothing on the docket got worse for a grant this week; the petition New Jersey filed is exactly the vehicle the August 28 buyers were paying for. What changed is that the calendar sank in. For the December rung to pay, the justices have to act on a petition filed September 2 inside about four months, through a response from Kalshi that runs on a 30-day clock the Court often extends. The last time New Jersey petitioned the Court over sports betting, in October 2016, the grant came in June 2017, eight months later. The October rung at 5.5 cents is the same arithmetic stated bluntly: a grant before Halloween is priced as a long shot. The one I keep coming back to is the shape of the round trip itself. A thin book got pushed to a coin flip by a headline, and it took a week for the price to remember that "will the Court take this?" and "will the Court take this by New Year's?" are different questions. That is the same distinction the Kalshi date ladder below is built on, and this page will use it again before the end.
Three Markets, Three Different Questions
Ask a search engine about the Supreme Court's next move and you get punditry. Ask Kalshi and you get three order books, with just over a million contracts traded across the open boards. That volume is spread across three separate series, and here is what trips people up: they are not three views of one question. They are three different questions, and the structure of each ladder changes what its prices mean.
Here is the thesis of this whole page, worth holding onto: a price only means something once you know how its ladder is built. One of these ladders sums toward roughly 100 percent. One must never sum to anything. One sums to a number that is not a probability at all. We will take them in the order a vacancy actually unfolds, which turns out to be the reverse of how Kalshi's traffic finds them, and by the end you will be able to run a coherence check across all three, one worth running before any order goes in.
All prices below were read from the live order books on September 4, 2026 at 10:20 a.m. ET, quoted as bid and ask in cents (bid = what a buyer will pay, ask = what a seller wants). They move. Treat them as a snapshot, not a quote.
Who Leaves: The Resignation Board
Everything starts with a seat opening, so start with the series that prices it: "Which justices will resign?" Nine markets, one per sitting justice, about 104,400 contracts traded on the open board.
| Justice | Yes bid / ask (cents) | Mid, cents |
|---|---|---|
| Samuel Alito | 58 / 64 | ≈61 |
| Clarence Thomas | 48 / 49 | ≈48.5 |
| John Roberts | 16 / 23 | ≈19.5 |
| Sonia Sotomayor | 8.1 / 9 | ≈8.5 |
| Amy Coney Barrett | 2 / 7 | ≈4.5 |
Top five of the nine markets shown; the other four justices (Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson) quote between 1 and 6 cents. Mid = the midpoint of bid and ask, in cents, before fees.
Start with the top row: the market prices a Samuel Alito resignation announcement at roughly 61 cents on the mid, the top price on a board where Clarence Thomas sits about a dozen cents behind him and everyone else is under 20. That price has firmed since our August read, and the quote it has to live alongside was already on the record before that read: in a Wall Street Journal piece published August 7, Alito said: "Obviously I'm here for another term." Read the contract before reading anything into that. This market runs to January 20, 2029, and "another term" ends in June 2027, so the statement and the price are not in conflict; the price simply covers a year and a half more than the sentence does. That is a report on the contract and the quote, not on anyone's plans. These contracts price an event; they say nothing about anyone's reasons, health, or intentions, and neither do we.
The settlement fine print here does real work. A market resolves Yes if the justice resigns or announces intent to resign before the deadline, so the announcement alone settles it, and the market closes early when that happens. Death does not count: the rules state plainly that death is not resignation and will not resolve a market to Yes, so a seat can open that way while these contracts run on to their deadline unpaid. A trader who assumes "vacancy = Yes" has misread the contract before placing a single order.
Now the structural point. These nine markets are independent binaries. More than one justice can leave, so the prices do not compete for a fixed 100 cents the way a winner-take-all board does. Add up the nine mid prices and you get roughly 154 cents, and that number is not a probability of anything: it is the market's expected count of Yes resolutions, about one and a half announced departures. Force that sum toward 100 percent, the way you would strip the vig out of a sportsbook market, and you have inverted the board's meaning.
When: The Confirmation Date Ladder
A resignation only matters to the other two series once it produces a confirmed replacement, and that bridge is the second series: "New Supreme Court justice confirmed?" Five date rungs, about 201,800 contracts on the open board.
| Rung | Yes bid / ask (cents) | Mid, cents |
|---|---|---|
| Before Oct 1, 2026 | 0 / 1 | ≈0.5 |
| Before 2027 | 7.9 / 8 | ≈8 |
| Before June 2027 | 17 / 22 | ≈19.5 |
| Before 2028 | 39 / 56 | ≈47.5† |
| Before Jan 21, 2029 | 14 / 78 | thin book† |
†The two deepest rungs trade thin. The "Before 2028" book is 17 cents wide and its last trade printed at 46; the far rung's last trade printed at 60.
This ladder is nested. "Before 2028" contains every world in which "Before 2027" happens, so prices must rise as you move down the rungs. On the rungs with two-sided books they do: the bids run 0, then 7.9, then 17, then 39, though that 39 sits on the wide book you will meet again below. The rungs will never sum to 100, and they are not supposed to. Anyone who adds them up, or reads the 39-cent rung as a standalone "39 percent chance," has applied the wrong grammar. One rung does look out of order. The far "Before Jan 21, 2029" rung sits at a 14 bid, below the 39 bid on a rung it contains, which on paper violates the rule you just learned. There is no way to actually trade that inversion: the book behind it is 14 bid against 78 ask, with under seven hundred contracts ever traded. Read it as a symptom of a thin book on a distant deadline, not as information. It is also a preview of the liquidity problem the next section makes concrete, and the exact pattern the Polymarket rung above just acted out in public.
Notice, too, how the ladder lines up against the decision calendar from the top of this page. The rungs that close this fall and at New Year's price in single digits; the first big jump lands on the rung that closes at the end of 2027: the first deadline with a full June, the stretch where term-end announcements historically live, on the near side of it.
A Worked Example: The 2027 Price The Ladder Never Lists
The worked example that makes nested ladders click: take the bid on "Before 2028" (39 cents) and subtract the ask on "Before 2027" (8 cents). That 31-cent gap is the cautious read on the confirmation landing during calendar 2027 specifically, a price the ladder never lists as its own rung, built by subtraction. It is a floor on the value, not a fill: actually putting that spread on means paying the other side of both books, the 56 ask on one rung and the 7.9 bid on the other, about 48 cents today. The "Before 2028" book alone is 17 cents wide, so a mid-to-mid version of the same arithmetic lands near 40. Every nested date ladder on every exchange works this way, and once you can do it here you can do it on Kalshi's economic and election boards too.
The steepness tells its own story. The market treats a confirmation in the next few months as a long shot, then climbs toward the deadline rungs, and the biggest single step sits between mid-2027 and end-of-2027, 17 cents up to 39 on the bid side. Read that shape as the ladder saying most of the probability lives in the back half of the window, the stretch that opens with the June 2027 opinion season and the term-end departures that have historically come with it.
Who: The 39-Name Ladder
Only after a seat opens and a nomination survives the Senate does the flagship series pay anyone: "Who will be the next Supreme Court justice?" Thirty-nine open markets, one per name, and about 696,800 contracts on the open board, the highest-volume of the three.
| Candidate | Yes bid / ask (cents) | Mid, cents |
|---|---|---|
| Andrew Oldham | 18 / 19 | ≈18.5 |
| James Ho | 7.4 / 10 | ≈8.7 |
| Emil Bove | 6.4 / 9.8 | ≈8.1 |
| D. John Sauer | 6 / 9 | ≈7.5 |
| Aileen Cannon | 6.2 / 8 | ≈7.1 |
| Amul Thapar | 6 / 8 | ≈7 |
Top six by mid price of the 39 names shown.
The second row teaches the most, because of where it was. On August 19 James Ho led this board at 14 bid, 15 ask, a penny-wide book at the top of the ladder. The price sat at that level for ten days, then two trading sessions three days apart took him to 7.4 bid against a 10 ask, and the whole descent took about a thousand contracts: 439 traded on August 29, 572 on September 1. Andrew Oldham took the top rung on even less, walking from a 12 bid to 16 on 124 contracts on September 1, and to 18 on thin trade since. We could source no news that explains either move; the honest reading is that on a book this thin, a few hundred contracts is enough to reorder the top of the ladder. Which is the point. How you enter matters as much as what you think on rungs like Emil Bove's, quoted 6.4 bid against 9.8 ask, a spread roughly half the size of the bid, because crossing a book that wide hands away more than most opinions are worth. Thin books are their own subject, and this ladder is full of them below the top handful of names.
Structurally this ladder is the opposite of the resignation board. Only one person can be the first confirmed, so the 39 names are mutually exclusive, and buying every one of them should cost roughly a dollar plus the overround. Live, that is exactly what you see on the ask side: pay every name's ask and you spend about 104 cents, the few cents over a dollar being the market's built-in margin. The mids sum lower, near 90 cents, and the bid side only to about 75, because the bids under the top handful of names are soft. That gap between 75 on the bid and 104 on the ask is the price of thin books, not a statement about the race. If you want the cent prices as American odds, the conversion is mechanical.
One honest subtlety: every name on this ladder resolves No if no confirmation happens before the deadline, or if someone not listed is confirmed first. So the sum of these prices carries the "does a confirmation happen at all" question inside it, which is exactly the question the date ladder prices directly. This thread ties the three boards together, so pull on it.
What Moved Since August 19, 2026
This page first priced these boards on August 19. Here is what changed in the 16 days since, and why none of it changes how the ladders are read.
- The Who-Ladder Has A New Leader. James Ho led at 14 / 15 on August 19 and now quotes 7.4 / 10; Andrew Oldham went from 12 / 16 to 18 / 19 and holds the top rung. Emil Bove, quoted 2.5 / 3.1 in August, printed as high as 36 cents during a single session on August 25 before closing that day near 10, on about 3,300 contracts, and now sits third at 6.4 / 9.8. The board's ask-side sum eased from about 108 cents to about 104.
- The Date Ladder's Back Rung Sagged On Almost No Volume. "Before 2028" was 63 bid, 86 ask in August; the ask walked down through the month, it traded down to 57 on August 28 on about 600 contracts, and on September 3 it printed at 45 and 46 on about ten contracts, leaving the book at 39 / 56 by the morning of September 4. Open interest barely moved the entire time, which is a thin book repricing, not a crowd changing its mind. The worked-example subtraction above shrank from 53 cents to 31 with it.
- The Resignation Board Firmed At The Top. Samuel Alito climbed through two sessions of modest volume, August 29 and September 1, to a 64 / 69 book and a 69-cent print on September 2, then eased back to 58 / 64 by September 4. That 69 print now sits above the ask, stale, like the deep date rungs. The board's summed mids barely moved, from about 154 cents to about 154.5.
- Kalshi's Own Case Reached The Court's Doorstep. The Ninth Circuit's August 28 ruling split the circuits, New Jersey petitioned on September 2, and Polymarket's December rung on a grant made a round trip from 29 cents to 58 and back to 30.5. The full record is in the two sections above.
With the boards current, the interlock between them is the part worth carrying forward.
The Coherence Check: Reading All Three Together
Line the three series up and the interlock is mechanical. A justice announces a departure and the resignation board settles its market. A seat is open. The date ladder now prices how fast the Senate converts the vacancy into a confirmation. The 39-name ladder prices who that confirmation names. A vacancy must happen before a confirmation can, so the resignation board is upstream of everything, the date ladder is the bridge, and the who-ladder is the destination.
The one rule that ties it togetherthe resignation board sums to an expected count, about 154 cents, roughly one and a half departures. The date ladder is nested and must never sum to 100. The 39-name board is a partition that costs about a dollar plus overround to buy outright. Same subject, three different grammars; mix them up and the price tells you the opposite of what it means.
The ordering hands you a sanity test no single board can. The 39-name board's total, read on mids, hovers near 90 cents, the market's rough read on some listed name being the next confirmed justice. The natural thing to check it against would be the date ladder's terminal rung, "Before Jan 21, 2029," because both series run to the same deadline and that rung prices a confirmation happening at all before it. But that rung is the thin one you met in the date-ladder section, the book with the bid and offer more than 60 cents apart, so it is currently too illiquid to serve as a clean check, and no liquid cross-series version of it exists right now. Read it anyway, because the mismatch is the story: near 90 cents on the who-board against a 46-cent mid and a 60-cent last print on the terminal date rung, two boards on one exchange, both running to January 2029, both pricing whether a confirmation happens at all. A 30-cent disagreement like that is not an edge, since a book quoted 14 bid and 78 ask makes the 46 barely a price, but it is the clearest demonstration on this page of what a thin book does to a mid. Perfect reconciliation is not the point; spreads this wide on books this thin mean the mids are soft. The point is that the three boards are pricing overlapping pieces of one event, so when one of them lurches, the other two tell you whether it was information or just a thin book getting pushed. That is the test the Polymarket cert rung failed in public last week, and the test the "Before 2028" rung is failing quietly right now. A reader who checks one ladder against the others is doing something most of the volume on these boards never does.
And remember the callback from the resignation board: its 154-cent sum is an expected count, not a probability, so it can never be reconciled against the other two by addition. Each ladder keeps its own grammar even when they share a story.
What Settles These, Exactly
Settlement language is where casual readers lose money, so be precise. The who-ladder and the date ladder settle on confirmation by the Senate, full stop. A nomination does not settle anything. A nominee who is announced, dominates a news cycle, and then withdraws before the floor vote leaves both boards exactly where they were. The who-ladder's rules name the first person confirmed by the Senate before the deadline, so being nominated first and confirmed second pays nothing.
The resignation board settles on the announcement of intent, not the final day in the robe, and death resolves it No. If an outcome ever looks ambiguous, Kalshi has a documented process for disputed settlements, but the plain text of these rules is unusually clean.
The settlement rule in one lineconfirmation ladders pay on a Senate confirmation vote, nothing earlier; the resignation board pays on an announcement of intent, and death settles it No. Every misread of these boards we have seen starts with skipping one of those three clauses.
The Risk Shape, Before You Touch Any Of This
These boards invite one bad trade in particular: selling the long tail. Run the numbers on the 39-name ladder itself. The six names in the table above account for roughly 57 of the board's ~90 mid-cents, which leaves about 33 cents spread across the other 33 rungs, a tail of contracts averaging about a cent apiece that reads as found premium to a seller. Understand the asymmetry before touching it: selling an unlikely outcome collects a small premium and risks most of a dollar. Sell a single-digit name around 8 cents and one loss erases the premiums from about 11 wins; sell down in that penny tail, where each rung fetches around a cent, and one loss can erase the premiums from a hundred or more of them. The arithmetic, not anyone's hit rate, is what makes position sizing the whole game, and on a subject where a single term-end announcement can reprice every rung of all three boards at once, the tail is where that lesson gets taught. What a price does and does not promise is worth internalizing before the first order, and so is what trading actually costs.
We trade prediction markets ourselves and hold positions in them, and we do not publish performance figures: no track record, no hit rate. Any such record on a book this young would be far too small a sample to prove or disprove anything, so treat this section as the lesson we keep re-learning at our own expense. For how these markets work from the ground up, our Kalshi weather-markets explainer is the gentlest on-ramp on the exchange.
Where You Can Trade These
These are Kalshi listings, and the regulatory status is the load-bearing fact here, which is exactly why the top of this page matters to the bottom of it. Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated exchange, and that federal license is the reason a market naming sitting justices can exist at all in the United States. What the August 28 ruling put in play is a narrower question: whether that license also shields Kalshi's sports contracts from state gambling law. Nothing in the Ninth Circuit's opinion names the three bench boards on this page; they are political-event contracts, and the one adjacent question, election contracts, went back to the district court rather than being decided. So the honest answer to the heading: the three bench boards are live wherever the exchange is, because they are political-event contracts and no order on the map names them. The sports side is different. Sports event contracts are already blocked in Nevada, where the Gaming Control Board says Kalshi's operations are "unlawful in Nevada," and in Washington, under a King County geofence order with a September 2 compliance deadline, and the swap-or-bet question behind both is now openly contested between two circuits. Where Kalshi is legal, state by state and what Kalshi's regulation actually means are both covered in depth elsewhere on this site. We have no affiliate or commercial relationship with Kalshi, so none of the above is a sales pitch; it is a description of the most interesting three-board structure currently listed anywhere, and of the case that will decide how much of the exchange's sports business survives alongside it.
If the way these ladders interlock is the part that grabbed you, the same mechanics run through every market class on the exchange, and the Polymarket cert rung showed that the grammar travels across venues too. This page stays deliberately on the report-the-contract side of the line: no sides, no leans, on a board that lists sitting justices and a case that is still being briefed. If you want the other thing, humans publishing actual calls, that lives with our sports analysts at free expert picks today, a different discipline for a different kind of market.
More on this: Next Supreme Court Justice Odds: Kalshi Needs A Vacancy · Where Does Bitcoin End 2026? Kalshi's Price-Band Odds · Iowa Governor Odds 2026: The Man Who Beat Trump's Pick · NFL Spread Predictions: The Panel Doubts Almost Every Favorite · Colorado Vs Georgia Tech Picks: Two Untested QBs, One Team That Can Run
Disclosure
Stokastic trades prediction markets and holds positions in them; assume we may have an interest in any market we cover. We have no affiliate or commercial relationship with Kalshi. Kalshi event contracts are CFTC-regulated event derivatives traded on a designated contract market, and they can lose their full value. Whether its sports contracts are also sports bets under state law is the question now before the courts, as described above. 18+. Availability is state-specific and subject to federal oversight; eligibility requirements apply. Nothing on this page is trading, legal, or financial advice.
Trade prediction markets on the Polymarket US App too.Most readers here already have Kalshi. The Polymarket US App is the other major US venue, and code OS4 adds a $50 trading bonus on a $10 deposit: Get the Polymarket bonus →
Affiliate disclosure: OddsShopper earns a commission on signups through this link. Terms as stated by Polymarket. 18+ Only. Restrictions and eligibility requirements apply. Not available in all jurisdictions. Trading is risky. 100% loss can occur. See polymarket.com/tos for more information. The Polymarket US App serves as an independent software provider and affiliate of Polymarket US and Polymarket Clearing, the CFTC-regulated exchange and clearing organization.
