Ten groupings that recur on a schedule, so a strategy can be built once and run repeatedly. Series names and cadence are high confidence. Volume figures are a snapshot from 2026-09-07 and move. Part of Kalshi Research.
The grouping axis is what the trading job actually is, not what the market is about. Trading the CPI ladder and the Fed ladder is the same job. Trading the CPI ladder and quoting weather brackets is not.
Scheduled macro releases
KXCPI KXCPICORE KXPCECORE KXPAYROLLS KXU3 KXJOBLESSCLAIMS
Weekly for claims, monthly for CPI, PCE, jobs, retail and housing, quarterly for GDP. Settlement lands half an hour to ninety minutes after release, on the exact BLS, BEA, DOL or Census series named in the rules.
Headline CPI runs 0.8 to 1.6 million contracts a month; payrolls 360,000 to 615,000. Retail holds the book most of the month; makers and macro desks arrive in the last two days, and about half the contracts in live CPI strikes come from 1,000-lot-plus orders.
Public nowcasts are good: Cleveland Fed, GDPNow, the New York Fed, Truflation, state claims data, ADP and Homebase for payrolls. Makers pay fees here.
Fed decisions and rate path
KXFEDDECISION KXRATECUTCOUNT KXFEDHIKE KXFOMCDISSENTCOUNT
Eight meetings a year, closing 13:59 ET on decision day. The deepest macro book on the exchange: one July 2026 event settled 68.8 million contracts on 1c spreads.
The crowd already has the data. FedWatch, SOFR futures and Treasury options give the full settlement distribution free, and Federal Reserve staff research treats these prices as near-efficient. Any edge is speed, not modeling.
Price binaries
KXBTC15M KXBTCD KXETH15M KXGOLD15M KXSILVER15M
Every 15 minutes around the clock for crypto. The largest non-sports volume on the exchange: the 15-minute Bitcoin series runs a median 2.1 million contracts per window, roughly 200 million a day.
Settles on the CF Benchmarks 60-second average, not the chart. A pure speed contest against bots reading the same order books. The features worth studying are structural rather than predictive: the tie-to-YES rule, the fee curve, and retail demand clustering on round numbers. Sits on shard 2.
Weather and hazards
KXHIGHNY KXHIGHLAX KXHIGHCHI KXLOWTNYC KXRAIN
The deepest recurring book outside sports and crypto. Los Angeles daily highs run about 683,000 contracts a day, New York 214,000, Miami 151,000, Chicago 126,000.
Settlement is station-specific and unforgiving. Central Park for New York. Midway for the Chicago daily, but O’Hare for Chicago rain. Hobby for the Houston daily. Local Standard Time, 0.1C precision.
This is where free public models are most clearly better than the crowd’s narrative pricing: NWS MOS and NBM, HRRR, GFS and ECMWF ensembles, raw ASOS and METAR feeds, NHC probabilities. Makers pay no fee.
One measured asymmetry: the official settling maximum exceeds the maximum of every transmitted METAR observation by a median 0.90F, flipping the rounded whole-degree value on 62 to 67% of days against 2F-wide bands.
Sports
KXNFLGAME KXNBAGAME KXMLBGAME KXNHLGAME KXNFLSPREAD
Roughly 83 to 90% of exchange volume. NBA games alone have traded 11.7 billion contracts lifetime.
Retail bettors with home-team and longshot bias, against designated makers earning rebates. The plausible edge is breadth into neglected prop and period markets, not beating a closing line. 107 series charge maker fees, and tennis and baseball sit on shard 3.
Worth knowing before assuming a vig advantage: across 103 live two-outcome events the median mid overround is exactly 1.0000 and the ask overround 1.0100. The makers already quote an arbitrage-free surface off the same sharp feeds.
Elections and polling
CONTROLH CONTROLS KXHOUSERACE KXGOVCA-26 SENATETX
Presidential nomination markets have traded 212 million contracts lifetime. House control for 2026 carries 18 million in open interest.
No maker rebates. The counterparty is partisan retail and cross-exchange arbitrageurs. A barbell with nothing in the middle: across 11,674 open election markets the median quoted spread is 7c, median touch depth $5, 44% have never traded, and 80% of volume sits in 104 markets.
Institutional process events
KXGOVTSHUTDOWN KXGOVSHUTLENGTH KXFEDCHAIRNOM KXSENATECONFIRM
Shutdown length has 120 million contracts lifetime. Everything outside the headline binaries is thin.
Settles on OPM notices, Senate roll calls, court opinions and the Federal Register. Counterparties include genuine hedgers: federal contractors, crypto firms, and in one documented case a goat-herding company hedging a wage rule. No model beats the crowd; reading process faster and more literally does.
Mention and transcript markets
KXTRUMPSAY KXTRUMPMENTION KXFEDMENTION KXSECPRESSMENTION
219 million contracts lifetime on the Trump mention series, with 28 million on a single State of the Union. Thirty to fifty word contracts per event, settling within hours.
Almost entirely retail entertainment flow. No maker program, no maker fee, and no designated liquidity provider holding a market-maker agreement in the category. Susquehanna has said on the record that it does not participate here, framing it as a warning to retail rather than an edge left on the table.
The forecasting thesis does not survive measurement. Across 10,643 settled markets the crowd’s Brier score improves from 0.2155 at listing to 0.1428 an hour before the event, and a naive word-history model scores worse than the listing mid.
Kalshi delisted all sports mention markets on 2026-08-19, so category risk is live.
Index nowcasting
KXAAAGASD KXAAAGASW KXNETFLIXRANKSHOW KXTOPSONG
Gas is the deep one: a median 219,000 contracts a day and 674,000 a week, on 1c spreads.
Settles on a published number read off a named page at a named time. The purest form of the thesis that upstream data beats narrative: GasBuddy and RBOB futures lead the AAA print mechanically, FlixPatrol leads Netflix Tudum, Spotify daily charts lead Billboard.
Awards and honors
KXOSCARPIC KXOSCARACTO KXGRAMAOTY KXCRITICSPIC
Best Picture has traded 37 million contracts lifetime. The 2027 event already carries 4.9 million volume against 3.6 million open interest.
Fan and stan-community retail with favorite-artist bias. Precursor databases and citation-laureate lists give a real but bounded edge, because no upstream feed determines a vote. Capital turns once a year, which caps compounding.
One mechanical exception worth naming: some award winners are published on the exact body Kalshi names as its source agency, with machine-readable markers, while the markets stay active for days.