Kalshi has filed to list contracts on admission rates at 22 selective US colleges, including all eight Ivy League schools. It self-certified them with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) on October 19 and 20, filings show.
Each contract settles on one line of the school's Common Data Set, a standardized report published after admission decisions are out. Admissions offices therefore know the answer before traders do.
The contracts would join a market where Kalshi, Polymarket and Polymarket's US venue handled $172.4 billion in taker notional volume in the third quarter, up from $98.5 billion in the second, FM Intelligence data show.
London's trading industry is coming home!
Kalshi, which raised $1 billion at a $22 billion valuation in May, told The Chronicle of Higher Education it hopes to launch "in the coming months," before spring 2027 decisions.
One Line in Each School's Report Decides the Payout
Besides the Ivy League, the list includes Stanford, MIT, Caltech, Duke, the University of Chicago, UC Berkeley and UCLA. Traders would buy yes or no on whether a school's first-year admission rate or number of applicants lands above, below, at or between set values.
Each contract has a $1 notional value and a one-cent tick, according to the Duke filing. Position accountability sits at $25,000 per strike, per member.
Only Item C1 of the Common Data Set counts, not the university's own results announcements, class profiles or press statements. In one worked example, Duke announces a 4.3% rate in March and its Common Data Set later shows 4.6%, so the contract settles on 4.6%.
Kalshi Names the Insiders Before Trading Starts
The Duke notice bars admissions officers, application readers, institutional research staff and communications staff with early access to the data. Employees of vendors that process Duke's applications are barred too, as are the families and households of everyone listed.
Kalshi has already sanctioned traders who knew or could shape an outcome. Last year a candidate who traded on his own election paid $2,246.36, and a YouTube channel editor who traded on upcoming videos paid $20,397.58, according to sanctions it disclosed in February.
In August, Kalshi banned former congressman George Santos for life and fined him $71,356 after concluding he had likely traded on inside information. That penalty is about 3.5 times the YouTube editor's, by FinanceMagnates.com's calculation.
"We have algorithms that will look for people who are betting oddly on odd events," Abraham Wyner, a Wharton School professor who studies probabilistic modeling, told The Daily Pennsylvanian.
Surveillance at prediction markets already draws scrutiny in Washington. In May, the House Oversight Committee asked Kalshi and Polymarket how they verify identities and flag suspicious trades.
Listing Without Prior Approval
Self-certification lets Kalshi list a contract a day after notifying the CFTC, and the Duke filing gave October 20 as its first listing date. The markets had not launched by Friday, Inside Higher Ed reported.
Kalshi's US500 perpetual took the other route and went live this month after a CFTC review of less than two months. A Kalshi spokesperson told The Daily Pennsylvanian the admissions process would take several weeks.
Kalshi filed a separate notice for each college. In July, CFTC staff told exchanges that broad, template-style certifications combining many contract variations "should not be submitted."
Angel B. Pérez, chief executive of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, told The Chronicle the idea was "absurd." Kalshi already lists other higher-education markets, including one on Harvard's lawsuit over frozen federal funding.
In another of the filing's examples, Duke posts the figures for the class entering in fall 2027 in June 2028. A contract on that season can stay open until December 31, 2028 if no Common Data Set appears.
This article was written by Damian Chmiel at www.financemagnates.com.
Source: Finance Magnates
