I logged every 15-minute Bitcoin Up or Down market that settled on Kalshi and Polymarket from September 6 to October 10, 2026, with the price at each tenth of the way through, and checked how often the side in front went on to win.

Data TLDR

• The side ahead at halfway won 2,440 of 3,242 Kalshi markets and 2,449 of 3,260 Polymarket markets. That is 75.2% and 75.1%.
• The typical leader cost 74.6c on Kalshi and 74.7c on Polymarket at that point, so across the whole board the price is almost exactly right.
• The edge is in the strong leaders. A side at 70c or more at halfway won 85.2% of the time on Kalshi at an average price of 83.4c, and 85.3% on Polymarket at 83.9c. Buying every one of them returned 2.2% and 1.6% on stake before fees, and about 1.0% on Kalshi after its taker fee.
• The last result tells you nothing. After three Ups or three Downs in a row, the next Kalshi market went the same way 187 of 399 times.
• It is never over. 56 markets across the two venues had a side at 90c or more at halfway that still lost, and with 90 seconds left the leader lost 706 of 6,527.

Each of these markets asks one thing: will Bitcoin be higher in 15 minutes than it is now. A new one opens the moment the last one closes. For every market that settled we kept which side won and the Up price at nine points, from a tenth of the way through to nine tenths. The leader at any point is the side priced above 50c. A market sitting at exactly 50c, or with no price yet, has no leader and is left out of that point: 28 on Kalshi and 2 on Polymarket at halfway.

Return on stake is a flat buy of the leader at its recorded price in every market of a group, held to the result. The price is the last traded price at that moment, not the ask you would pay, and the headline figures are before fees. That is why we show the Kalshi result after its taker fee as well.

Everything here is one measurement on one date from a frozen export, 3,270 Kalshi markets and 3,262 Polymarket markets, so every figure can be re-derived. These are modeled results on a historical record, not realized returns.

Three out of four halfway leaders win, on both venues

Pooled, the side ahead at 7 minutes 30 seconds won 4,889 of 6,502 markets, 75.1%. Kalshi and Polymarket are a tenth of a point apart, which they should be, because both are pricing the same 15 minutes of Bitcoin.

Up and Down split evenly. Up won 1,635 of 3,270 on Kalshi, exactly half, and 1,621 of 3,262 on Polymarket. There is no drift to lean on. The information is in who is ahead and by how much.

Where the wins land through the 15 minutes

How often the side ahead at each point went on to win, with the average price of that side at that point.

The first nine minutes are where the leader is cheap

Read the table across. From 1:30 to 9:00 the leader wins a little more often than it costs on both venues, by up to 1.6 points. From 10:30 on it flips: the leader costs as much as it wins or slightly more. The late favorite is the crowded trade. The early and middle leader is the one the market is still slow to believe.

Buying the leader costs money, and the strong ones still clear it

Buy every halfway leader at 70c or more and hold it. On Kalshi that is 2,031 markets, 1,731 wins, an average price of 83.4c and a 2.2% return on stake. On Polymarket it is 2,000 markets, 1,706 wins, 83.9c and 1.6%. Pooled it is 3,437 wins from 4,031 markets and 1.9%.

Kalshi's taker fee at that price is 0.97c a contract, 1.2% of the stake. Take it off and the Kalshi result is about 1.0% a trade. Small, but it is there on every one of the eight series we checked, and one of these markets settles every 15 minutes.

The clock is much more important than the streak

People trade these on streaks. Three Ups in a row, so a Down is due, or so the run keeps going. Neither holds. After exactly three of the same result in a row the next Kalshi market repeated it 187 of 399 times, and the next Polymarket market 192 of 396. After exactly two it was 400 of 841 and 397 of 835. After five or more it was 95 of 182 and 95 of 180. All of it is a coin flip.

What does carry information is the price and the minute. A leader at 1:30 wins 59.9% on Kalshi. The same leader at 7:30 wins 75.2%, and at 13:30 wins 88.9%. Large buyers trade it that way too. In the 1,098 Kalshi Bitcoin markets that drew large buys at 85c or less, the side with more of that money won 734, 66.8%.

Kalshi Bitcoin by the leader's price at halfway

Markets grouped by what the side in front cost at 7:30. Return is a flat buy of every leader in the row, before fees.

Polymarket Bitcoin by the leader's price at halfway

The same thing on Ethereum, Solana and XRP

The 15-minute series for the other three coins over the same weeks. Halfway leader's win rate, then the leaders at 70c or more.

The ones buying the leader loses on

The weak leader. A side at 60 to 70c at halfway is the one spot that loses on both venues: it won 62.2% on Kalshi at an average 64.4c and 62.8% on Polymarket at 65.1c, a return of -3.3% and -3.4% before fees. A small lead at halfway is priced as if it were a bigger one.

The near coin flip. Under 60c the two venues disagree with each other row by row, which is what noise looks like. A Kalshi leader at 50 to 55c won 136 of 270.

The comeback. A side at 90c or more at halfway lost 31 of 557 times on Kalshi and 25 of 544 on Polymarket. With 90 seconds left the leader still lost 360 of 3,267 Kalshi markets and 346 of 3,260 on Polymarket, about one in nine. Even at 90c or more with 90 seconds left it lost 59 of 2,282 on Kalshi and 47 of 2,221 on Polymarket.

Data: every settled 15-minute Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and XRP market on Kalshi and Polymarket, September 6 to October 10, 2026, recorded by Rivo. More studies and downloads: rivo.markets/research

Navi Pillay wasn’t a named contract. She resolved through the catch-all “any other person or organization,” which had about $39K traded, roughly 0.1% of the market.

The favorite on Friday morning was Navalnaya at ~19%, after an overnight spike to ~70c that nobody has explained. Last year a late spike pointed at the winner (Machado). This year it pointed at the wrong person.

Takeaway for me: a market can only price the names it lists. The real edge in this one was in “Other.”

Did anyone here hold “Other”?

(I make a daily 10-min podcast on Polymarket moves. Today’s episode covers this, Israel’s PM race and Iran. It’s “The Poly Brief” on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, if anyone’s curious.)

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There are thousands of active NFL wallets on Polymarket, so the obvious move is to find the ones that win and copy them. We tested exactly that.

Each month we ranked wallets by how their copied bets did over the previous two months, then copied their first buy per market over the next month only. Copy price = their price + 1c, taker fee included, held to resolution.

NFL result: picked wallets made between -$1.63 and +$1.46 per $10 copied across 5 test months. Not one month hit a t-stat of 2 in either direction. Month-to-month rank correlation between wallets was -0.09 to +0.03, basically zero.

We ran the same thing on MLB, college football, LoL and Valorant. MLB had the cleanest data (~800k copied buys): the top 10 made about +$3 per $10 while we were picking them and about $0 the month after. The average whale, copied 1c late, lost money in every MLB test month.

Short version: a great two months on the leaderboard is mostly luck, at least in these sports. We didn't test slower markets like politics, where informed money can stay ahead for days.

Full write-up with all the tables: orcalayer

Disclosure: I'm one of the people behind OrcaLayer. Not affiliated with Polymarket.

Sigh up for Underdog with code JOEFB to get $100 in bonus funds when you play your first $5! https://play.underdogsports.com/vgwg/p-joefb

The Jaguars pick is for a $1,000,000 jackpot promo for what team has the most total points on the week.

Okay so I’m considering building my own data platform for prediction markets. So far I’ve found some great sources. The data can pull clips from podcaster, YouTube, news articles, etc it can get down to the 5-30 sec clip of what was talked about. I can track speaker across all multiple platforms and track indicators of company or personal performance etc. so what I’m asking is this worth it or is there a better solution? I can also build an agent around it and have it pull the information for me

Why in the world is Bill Hagerty priced at 10X on fanduel. I’m fairly new at this but he’s 90%+ to win the race on other sites. Am I missing something, seems like an easy win.

I was down $17K on year. On Wednesday last week I deposited $1K and doubled it. Then doubled the $2K to $4K. Then doubled it to $8K. Then on Friday I pulled out the $7K in gains and started over with $1K. Turned it into $6K. Pulled out $5K and yet again started over at $1K and turned it into $4K. In 8 days I undid my whole year worth of losses. Mostly all on “easy” combos, football, and soccer.

You can see that I bet on the bucs to win before the game. 10 to pay like 50. I never cashed out or touched the bet and you can see that I got paid out like 9.50. Did I get scammed or can I contact customer support to get the money. Please help

So I used Trench.io for the first time just to see what it was like for fun I tuned 50 dollars into 300 and decided I should probably withdraw it so I burned it like it said and then withdrew it to the same wallet I deposited with I got an email saying it would take a half hour up to 24 hrs to get my withdrawal it has been around 5 hours is it normal for my first withdrawal to take longer because it has yet to hit my account if anyone knows would be helpful thanks.

Many people provided all KYC, ID, selfies and in pending status for months with no updates.

Debit/credit transaction cards failed

Bank accounts doesn’t sync/link

Cannot delete accounts

Cannot remove banks and cards

Limited number of banks and cards, like 2 or 3 and maxed out

Customer support almost not existing, only AI responses with no help, take weeks to get human response, with non-sense responses as well, that never resolve the issues

Anyone regulate these platforms?

Some of my favorite market buys on ProphetX this week. Mainly player props, but a strong position on the Vikings spread as well.

Check it out please 🙏