Wall Street firm announces it will trade on Kalshi
While the rest of the world is rejecting the mainstream adoption of prediction markets, the complete opposite continues unabated in the United States.
This week, brokers Canto Fitzgerald announced it has opened Kalshi prediction markets to its institutional clients. Where they had previously just been the domain of retail customers, this marks the first big move from Wall Street into the marketplace.
The firm is bringing on Susquehanna International Group to help determine prices so that they can "transact at scale" - something which has previously been difficult for large brokerages. They will be executing large block trades outside of the exchange's main order book.
More mainstreaming in the United States
“Cantor has spent more than eighty years building institutional access to new markets, and prediction markets are the next one,” said Pascal Bandelier, Co-CEO and Global Head of Equities at Cantor. “Prediction markets are growing rapidly, but institutional participation has not kept pace because investors have lacked the ability to transact at scale on a regulated exchange. The liquidity is here. With the launch of block trading, institutional investors can now access block trading in event contracts through an institutional intermediary they know and trust.”
This is just one of many announcements in the past 12 months that has firmly established prediction markets as a financial service, at least in the United States. We have already seen prediction markets partner with major financial publications like the Wall Street Journal, Google Finance and CNBC. Polymarket has also received investment from the parent of the New York Stock Exchange.
However, in the rest of the world, the attitude towards them could be described as sceptical at best. We have seen a wave of countries in Europe, South America, and Asia that have either blocked prediction markets entirely or at least categorised them as gambling. Just this week, South Korea was the latest country to block Polymarket.
