How Real Money Is Entering Prediction Markets

Jeremy Maletz, who runs the macro trading and prediction markets division at Susquehanna (one of the most capital-heavy trading firms on the planet), explained how his company is building the bridge between two worlds that barely spoke until recently: Kalshi's prediction markets and serious institutional finance. What's interesting is that while everyone was watching the crypto chaos unfold, someone was quietly turning bets on "Who wins the election?" or "Will the Fed cut rates?" into actual financial instruments.

Kalshi is the platform that dared to put legally-compliant prediction markets online in the US (after years of legal battles you'd barely believe existed). Susquehanna, on the other hand, knows how to move when you're handling billions of dollars. The partnership isn't random—it's the moment when traditional finance realizes these markets actually work at discovering the "fair value" of a future event.

Susquehanna's market-making in this context means basically this: they put money in when nobody wants to trade, they guarantee liquidity, and they take a spread—classic bank behavior, but applied to markets where you're betting on inflation instead of soybeans. Not as sexy as trading Bitcoin, but infinitely more profitable when done right and at scale.

What Maletz highlights (and what Bloomberg documented in the Odd Lots podcast) is that prediction markets have finally become "grown up" from a market structure perspective. No longer just bets between enthusiasts, but systems where Susquehanna's algorithms run and institutions know there's decent liquidity and reasonable spreads. This is the moment when underground economics goes mainstream.

The paradox is that while the general public still doesn't quite know what Kalshi is, real money has already decided it's the place to be. Predictions about geopolitics, interest rates, political events—all the stuff that moves real portfolios—now have prices discovered by actual traders with real incentives to get it right. It's applied economics, not an online slot machine.