The most you can lose on one trade
A Kalshi event contract settles at $1.00 if it wins and $0 if it loses. You pay the price when you buy, so the price is your stake. If the contract loses, the stake is gone and nothing more is owed.
Say you buy 10 YES contracts at 62¢ on a BTC 15-minute market.
| Amount | |
|---|---|
| Cost of the contracts | 10 × 62¢ = $6.20 |
| Trading fee | about $0.17 |
| If bitcoin closes up or flat (YES wins) | You receive $10.00: a profit of about $3.63 |
| If bitcoin closes down (YES loses) | You receive $0: a loss of about $6.37 |
The fee comes from Kalshi's general fee schedule: 7% × number of contracts × price × (1 − price). Here that's 0.07 × 10 × 0.62 × 0.38 ≈ $0.165. Kalshi rounds the fee up, to the cent or a fraction of a cent depending on how your account is cleared, so you pay about $0.17. The fee peaks for contracts priced near 50¢ and shrinks toward either end of the range.
Can you lose more than you bet?
Not on event contracts. Buying YES at 62¢ and selling NO at 38¢ are the same position on Kalshi, and either way your maximum loss is the 62¢ you put up, plus the fee. With no leverage, no move in bitcoin can cost you more than your stake.
Kalshi's perpetual futures work differently. They use leverage and a separate margin account that has to be applied for, and Kalshi can liquidate a perps position when your margin runs low. The rest of this page is about event contracts.
Where losses actually come from
- Paying more than the real chance. A 62¢ YES pays off over time only if markets like it close up or flat more than 62% of the time. Kalshi's prices are hard to beat: across more than 9,000 BTC 15-minute markets, every 5¢ price band won within about 2 points of its price. See how often 90¢ contracts win.
- Fees and the spread. You buy at the ask and sell at the bid, and the gap between them is a cost, as is the fee. With a new BTC market every 15 minutes, small costs per trade compound fast.
- Judging yourself by win rate. A strategy that wins 9 trades in 10 can still lose money if it pays 95¢ for each one. Why a 90% win rate can still lose money works through the numbers.
Do most people lose money on Kalshi?
Kalshi doesn't publish how many of its traders make or lose money, so any figure you see is a guess. The structure says this much: every $1.00 paid to a winner was put up by the YES and NO buyers, and the fees come on top. Before any rebates or incentive programs, traders as a group pay more in than they take out, by the amount of the fees. To come out ahead, a trader has to be right more often than the prices they pay imply.
How to tell if you're losing
- Track profit per contract after fees, not the number of wins.
- Compare each trade's price with how often trades at that price won.
- Judge over hundreds of trades, not one good or bad afternoon. Fifteen-minute markets are noisy.