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1 episodes · 12 quoted claims
By the end of 2022 the CFTC delayed approval of Kalshi's election contracts until after the election, which Tarek Mansour calls a pocket veto.
“By the end of 22, they sort of like delayed the approval till after the election, what we call a pocket veto. That was brutal.”
Kalshi tried again to list election contracts and the CFTC blocked them again at the end of 2023.
“so we try again end of 23 they block it again and I was really at the point where I'm like”
After repeated rejections, Kalshi's founders concluded their only remaining option was to sue the government.
“the only thing we can do right now out of the entire range of possibilities is we've got to sue the government”
Tarek Mansour says Kalshi's best inflation forecaster in recent years is a Kansas resident with no prior trading experience.
“It's this guy who lives in Kansas, never traded financial markets before, just likes to read the news and just knows how to predict inflation.”
A tax accountant who traded on Kalshi researched tax law and bet that DOGE could not hit its spending-cut targets, according to Tarek Mansour.
“he actually read a bunch of tax codes and a bunch of statutes, just like dug extremely deep and then realized there is no way they could hit the targets”
Kalshi recently launched Kalshi Research and is talking to AI labs about a benchmark for which models predict the future best.
“we launched Kalshi Research recently which and one of the threads that we want to work on is we're talking to some of the research labs to create a new benchmark around which models actually predict the future better”
Tarek Mansour argues that gambling businesses earn from customers' losses, unlike an exchange that earns transaction fees.
“gambling is this idea where the business model is you are the house and your revenue is your customer's losses”
Tarek Mansour cites a Kevin Hassett paper arguing that as the world grows more complex, understanding of asset prices decays unless there are markets for each underlying factor.
“there was a paper written by Kevin Hassett around this idea that like as society gets increasingly more complex our asset prices our understanding of asset prices will naturally decay like entropy will go up”
After the Citrini Research report on an AI-driven economic scenario, stocks sold off and Kalshi launched a prediction market on it.
“And that impacted markets, right? Like the stocks got, you know, there was a sell-off. And so we launched a prediction market on that.”
Tarek Mansour says Kalshi's market priced about a 10% chance that at least three of the five conditions in the Citrini scenario would occur.
“if three out of these five conditions hit, you could reasonably say that, okay, this outcome has somewhat materialized. And it's just 10%.”
Tarek Mansour says Zohran Mamdani's odds on Kalshi reached 94% in the New York mayoral race and his campaign urged supporters to still turn out.
“So you saw Mamdani when his odds were 94 % on Kalshi. The thing that he was messaging pretty consistently, and I think there was a little bit of worry there, it's like, you got to show up.”
Tarek Mansour says Kalshi spent four years getting regulated before it operated at scale.
“And again, we spent four years getting regulated up front.”