Gordon Gottsegen and Weston Blasi

Fri, May 23, 2025, 11:07 AM9 min read

Catholicism warns against gambling addiction. But that didn’t stop traders on Kalshi from wagering over $10 million on the answer to “Who will the next pope be?”

Kalshi, along with other prediction-market platforms like Polymarket and ForecastEx by Interactive Brokers IBKR, allows traders to bet on seemingly just about anything — from egg prices to interest rates to the U.S. presidential election. And while it’s easy to scoff at some of the more outlandish prediction markets — like “Will Luigi Mangione plead guilty to murder?” — critics may be glossing over something important.

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• Ships are canceling crossings to U.S., and Trump’s new 50% E.U. tariff threat isn’t likely to help

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Although these markets are relatively new, they already are reaching a broad audience and have become quite complex. And just like more traditional financial markets, traders have developed sophisticated arbitrage and market-making strategies to clear hefty sums of cash.

Coby Shpilberg is a 21-year-old who lives in Palo Alto, Calif. With a background in data analytics, he works as the chief technical officer at Adnexi, a clinical-trial startup he co-founded with his mom. At work, Shpilberg uses data science to identify people to participate in clinical trials. Outside of work, he uses that same expertise to trade on Kalshi.

Shpilberg has been trading on Kalshi for about a year. At first, he tried his luck trading markets that revolve around Rotten Tomatoes scores for recent and upcoming movies. He noticed that movie critics would release their reviews, which would then get uploaded to Rotten Tomatoes in batches, thus affecting a movie’s score. Shpilberg had a theory that if he built an algorithm that scraped the Rotten Tomatoes website for updates, he’d be able to trade those markets faster than others and thus gain an edge. He tried it but ended up losing money.

Next, Shpilberg had a theory that he could do something similar with the weather markets on Kalshi, using data to predict the temperatures in New York City better than anyone else. Again, he didn’t make any money.

In his first six months trading on Kalshi, Shpilberg was down a couple hundred dollars. Then, around the election, things started to change.