Why Did S&P Dow Jones Indices Sign With Kalshi?

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This piece was written and researched by Omar El Safy and edited by Pet Berisha.

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Last week we published Is the Fee-Free Era Over for Market Makers?, on why DKeX and Polymarket US have started charging the trading firms they used to pay.

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The company behind the S&P 500 signed a deal with Kalshi and it means two things.

1) Kalshi can list contracts on the S&P 500, the Dow and other S&P indices under licence, settled on S&P's official numbers.

2) S&P can build new indices from Kalshi's prices.

If a Kalshi price becomes an S&P index, a fund can track it, and one day you could buy the odds of a recession in your brokerage account like a share.

Kalshi already list the S&P 500. On 29 October 2026 you could buy yes on "S&P 500 at 7,725 or above at 12pm EDT" for 37¢, and get $1 if it came true.

Today Kalshi settle those markets on the index level from a public website, and their rules give Google Finance as an example. Under the licence, they settle on S&P's official number, which no US venue does today. ForecastEx, the only other US venue with S&P 500 contracts, settles on the price of CME's S&P 500 futures instead.

Kalshi only get the yes-or-no bet. The main S&P 500 futures market belongs to CME ($CME ( ▲ 0.81% )), and CME's annual report says they hold the exclusive licence for S&P 500 futures. Their E-mini future, used by professional traders, moves $50 for every point on the index, about $387,000 of exposure per contract at 7,743.98.

All of Kalshi's S&P 500 markets traded $98.7M in Q3 2026, the face value of about 255 E-mini futures. That is about 96% of S&P 500 event trading in the US, compared to $3.6M on ForecastEx. The Dow barely trades, at $1.2M on Kalshi in the same quarter.

S&P Dow Jones Indices, majority owned by S&P Global, are the company behind the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and they make their money by licensing those numbers. Funds that track the S&P 500 pay them a fee, exchanges like CME pay a royalty on every future and option on it, and banks and asset managers pay for the data.

In S&P Global's ($SPGI ( ▲ 2.52% )) Q3 2026 results, that business grew revenue 20% to $554M, and ETFs (funds you buy and sell like a share) tracking S&P indices held $6.52 trillion.

Kalshi's announcement names the new indices they have in mind, on political power, supply chain risk, AI's impact on jobs and weather risks to harvests and energy demand. Each would get a ticker, a fund could track it, and S&P would take a fee on every dollar in it.

Of the themes Kalshi named, politics, weather and economics markets across US venues traded $677M, $358M and $314M in Q3 2026, about 0.8% of US volume between them.

All three grew from a few million dollars a month in early 2025, but sports and combos grew faster.

And volume flatters some of them. Open interest, the money still sitting in unsettled contracts, shows how much is held in a market at once.

The Democratic presidential nominee market held $153.1M at its peak, and Fed decisions $67.3M. Kalshi's busiest weather markets traded $54.8M but never held more than $0.9M, because they settle every day, and we found no market of size on supply chains.

Contracts expire, but an index rolls into the next one, so you get one number that keeps running and a fund can track.

Adjacent, a startup, already builds these from Kalshi and Polymarket prices, and their own data shows 12 indices by 30 June 2026, 106 by 30 September 2026 and 149 by 29 October 2026.

Almost all are on sports and politics, and the first three on the economy and companies (a misery index, Tesla deliveries and SpaceX launches) arrived in October 2026.

Larger funds are still waiting. Roundhill, Bitwise and GraniteShares each filed for six ETFs on which party controls the White House, Senate and House, and the SEC delayed them in May 2026.

The only prediction market ETF you can buy, Tema's DICE, holds the companies instead, with 3.96% each in Kalshi and Polymarket on 15 October 2026.

On 27 October 2026, the CFTC approved Rothera's first KPI swap (a contract on a number a company reports about itself).

Rothera's filing asks "Will Tesla report Q3 2026 Adjusted EPS greater than $0.65?" Buy yes at, say, 40¢, and you get $1 if Tesla ($TSLA ( ▼ 0.23% )) beats $0.65 and nothing if they do not. Tesla had already reported $0.48 on 21 October 2026, so this first one settles no.

Rothera aren't the first to list markets on company numbers. Kalshi have run a "Tesla KPI" series on deliveries since at least April 2026 ($1.0M traded), a Meta headcount market since December 2025 ($0.9M) and markets on what companies say on their earnings calls. Last week they launched sector KPI markets with Carbon Arc on card spend, foot traffic and app downloads, and Polymarket US listed Tesla's Q3 2026 deliveries in July 2026, with about $91,000 traded.

What is new is that the CFTC approved Rothera's as a swap, its own product category. Next come swaps on earnings and margins, on users and trips, and on units made and delivered, each listed before the company reports.

Cboe ($CBOE ( ▼ 1.93% )) got SEC approval for their own version on 13 October 2026, on more than 100 numbers across 23 companies. Robinhood ($HOOD ( ▲ 0.18% )) co-own Rothera and will be Cboe's first broker.

Adjacent already have an index on Tesla deliveries, one of the numbers Rothera plan to list.

Our read is that it brings in new buyers on both sides.

The first are people who would never open a Kalshi account. If the ETFs get approved and track S&P-built indices, the odds sit in a normal brokerage or retirement account, next to the S&P 500 fund most people already own.

The wider trend, prediction markets moving onto company numbers and into brokerage apps, brings in smaller traders and companies with a number to hedge.

The cheapest CME S&P 500 future, the Micro, is about $38,700 of exposure, and a Kalshi contract tops out at $1. Robinhood say their customers already traded 16.4 billion event contracts in Q3 2026.

A supplier whose sales depend on Tesla deliveries could buy a contract that pays out if deliveries miss. Rothera CEO Tom Chippas said "Corporate KPI contracts allow market participants of all sizes a more precise way to manage risk."

For S&P, Kalshi are a new licensee, and prediction market prices are a new thing to sell to the funds, banks and asset managers who already pay for their data.

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