Your bag is empty.
Men used to go to war, now they also bet on it. Look no further than the soaring number of prediction markets where people wager on anything from “Will the Iranian regime fall by June 30?” on Polymarket—a bet that has cracked $33 million in trading volume. Over on Kalshi, which had $13 billion in trading volume alone in March, the “US-Iran nuclear deal by…” question has surpassed $5.2 million.
Those are just two of tens of thousands of live questions running on each prediction market platform at any given moment. If you’re wondering how deep we’ve dug into the technocapitalist hellscape where people bet on everything from a US-Iran ceasefire to if Donald Trump will say “transgender” this week to the second coming of Jesus Christ by 2027, look no further than the people collectively laying down millions and millions of dollars on these platforms: Men. On Kalshi, the company confirmed to Playboy, men make up 75 percent of all traders.
“In total, I’ve made $3 million on prediction markets, almost entirely in the past 2 years,” aenews, a prediction market trader in his late 20s who is ranked 47th all-time on Polymarket, told Playboy. “My largest win was $175,000 on ‘Will NASA declare 2024 July hottest on record?’ That was entirely data-driven, and at the time, was an absolutely gigantic win for me that snowballed my bankroll and paved the way to being one of the largest traders in the space,” he said.
His second largest win? A $130,000 bet on the Democratic nomination for New York City mayor in June 2025. “I originally held Cuomo on the conventional wisdom, but as the end of the primaries neared, I sold and completely flipped my position to Mamdani on the basis of the early voter enthusiasm,” he said. “I bought even more on election night.”
Before quitting his job to bet on prediction markets, aenews was in grad school studying astronomy. In 2016, he made his first prediction market bet on the platform PredictIt—$50 on Hilary Clinton to win the presidency. As we know, he lost, and he decided to stop engaging altogether. But in 2020, the pandemic hit and aenews, like many others, found himself isolated at home, extremely online, and watching the news to see the developments during the uncertainty.
“[I] was thinking “Hey, since I’m following this anyways, maybe there’s a way to monetize what I’m already doing.” The twenty-something year old began putting down bets on everything from the Iowa Caucus to the New Hampshire Primary and joined Discord servers with other likeminded traders. In 2021, he joined Polymarket and Kalshi to bet on the Biden inauguration. “2023 was the first year I made enough for it to be a ‘real job’ and I became a millionaire in 2024 as prediction markets exploded and opportunity in the space blew up,” he said.
The pandemic-fuelled curiosity into finding new ways to make money was similar for 27-year-old Champ from Tulsa, Oklahoma. A year after graduating with a degree in finance, he worked a Monday to Friday sales job at home during the height of the COVID-19—and that year he looked for any other way to make a living. “I was spending a lot of time on the internet in between sales calls, with a very strong desire to basically find a way out,” he told Playboy. “I was looking into everything like probably a lot of young people are.”
During that time, he started to get more engaged with fringe crypto markets and made a “good bit of money.” All the work he had done also got him thinking: there’s a huge market for educating other people about betting on everything from memecoins to how Polymarket works. Why don’t I create content?
By December 2024, a few years out of the pandemic lockdown, Champ posted one of his most viewed videos on his YouTube channel titled: “From $9K to $3.6 million. Here’s how I did it.” In our recent interview, he told Playboy that his net worth has risen quite a bit (he declined to say exactly how much). And on top of continuing to create content, he’s starting his own software, which claims to “exploit prediction markets to profit regardless of which wins,” its website reads.
What makes prediction markets so addicting? One thing in particular is Trump’s erratic behavior and disjointed rhetoric on social media, traders say, which has introduced more “exciting” markets and attraction to the platforms. Kalshi confirmed to Playboy that 70 percent of people visiting its platform aren’t even there to bet, but to look at the odds. “You’ll see huge movements based on a single Truth Social post. Learning how to parse what he says is also something you learn from experience,” aenews said.
For Caleb Davies, who by day works in IT and by night is a top 100 Kalshi trader, betting on Trump is something he largely avoids. “For example, tariffs are something he’s been in favor of his entire public life so it was pretty clear to me that he was going to go big on those.” In total, Davies has put down $30 million in trading volume on Kalshi. He’s had some big wins, including one for $120,000 betting against a federal government spending cut in 2025. But he’s also had some huge losses. “I lost, like, $60,000 (on a single bet in March)” Davies said. He believes his situation is different from many younger traders because of his stable income and the fact he’ll “always be able to collect a pay check” regardless of losses.
All this–including people betting on politics, destruction and war–isn’t surprising to Dr. Timothy Fong, Professor of Psychiatry and Co-Director of the Gambling Studies Program at UCLA, who says men love the instant gratification of these bets. “They like competition. They like stuff,” he explained. “Betting on real-life events isn’t new.”
What is new, Fong says, is the speed at which the tech is powering the gamification of ruination. “Literally every minute or every second, wages, and bets are changing. It’s a different game, meaning there’s different opportunities, which is why it’s so sticky,” Fong continued. “[It’s an] intersection between real life and games. It literally becomes Roman gladiators where you don’t care or you decrease your empathy about the participants.”
Just last month, Polymarket apologized and pulled a wager that allowed people to bet on if the US pilots in the F-15 plane that was shot down by Iranian troops were still alive. “DISGUSTING,” Massachusetts Democratic representative Seth Moulton posted to X in response. Kalshi told Playboy that it bans bets on similar topics. “As a federally regulated exchange, Kalshi bans markets tied to war, death, and assassination because of the perverse incentives they create. Kalshi traders can’t trade on these markets,” Elisabeth Diana, Director of Communications at Kalshi said. Still, everything from US-Iran ceasefire bets to anti-trans policies are up for stakes, and traders don’t seem to see an issue.
“You can already indirectly bet on war, escalation, and strikes in oil futures. The same current events that are tracked in depth for these markets also must be tracked for traditional stocks,” aenews said. Champ agrees. “These people that are managing hundreds of thousands of dollars trading things that are considered by most of the world very respectable markets are sitting around observing geopolitical situations, observing socioeconomic factors.”
There’s also the rampant issue of insider trading. On April 23, a US soldier was charged by the Department of Justice for allegedly using classified information from the Nicolás Maduro raid to place a bet on Polymarket. That same week, Kalshi said it fined and suspended three US politicians for betting on their own elections. And in May, Reuters reported that suspicious trades on platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket had exploded. A new study published also calls prediction markets a “public health threat” in the way it can “create risks of a new behavioral addiction and democratic manipulation”
“There are people like this who have really high win rates, and I mean that’s just very suspicious,” Georgia State University professor Todd Phillips, who previously served on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s (CFTC) advisory board told Playboy. The CFTC is the independent federal agency regulating derivatives markets, which is what Kalshi is classified under.
“So much of what’s happening on prediction markets is gambling and not finance. With an 80, 90, 100 percent win rate—that’s the type of thing where I think the government needs to get involved and needs to be looking at,” Phillips explained. “Where did all this come from? This all came about because this presidential administration stopped putting a hold on it. We can see the study of how it obviously grew so much and timing it to January 2025.”
By the end of 2030, investment firm analysts told CNBC that prediction markets will hit $1 trillion in trading volume. And the hard numbers? Both Polymarket and Kalshi have seen about $60 billion in trading volume in 2026 up from a total of $51 billion in 2025.
While Polymarket and Kalshi maintain their platforms will provide a clearer picture of the news because money is on the line, experts warn the rampant monetization and gamification will just numb more people to human suffering and catastrophe.
“You lose your humanness about it, you lose compassion about it,” Fong explained. “All you really care about is this reward that means more to you because you’re not thinking about, oh, you know, people are actually dying because of where I’m putting money at.”