PREDICT 2026: Why This Prediction Markets Conference Is Worth Watching

To everyone following Betting the Future:

On October 6 and 7, I'll be at the New York Marriott Marquis for PREDICT, the prediction markets conference put on by DealFlow Events. I'm attending as a media guest. It is the first of two prediction market conferences I'm covering in New York this month, and I want to tell you why it's worth watching and what I'm going there to find out.

What PREDICT is

PREDICT describes itself as a forum for how decentralized forecasting can improve decision-making, process information more efficiently, and price uncertainty. Strip the language and it is a market-structure conference. The people in the room are platform builders, investors, market makers, traders, economists, policymakers, lawyers, and researchers. The format is built around networking, with prescheduled one-on-one meetings alongside the panels. There is no livestream. If you want to be in the conversation, you have to be in the building.

The speaker list tells you what kind of conversation it is. More than seventy speakers are announced, and the roster reads like a map of who actually decides what this industry becomes:

• The regulators and the enforcers. The CFTC's General Counsel and its Director of Enforcement. The Chief of the Securities and Commodities Fraud Task Force at the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York.
• The venues. Kalshi's Chief Compliance Officer. The CEO of ForecastEx. The CEO of Aristotle and PredictIt. The head of DraftKings Predictions. Gemini Predictions' general counsel.
• The institutions. Heads of prediction markets at Susquehanna and Galaxy Digital. Millennium's vice chairman for external and regulatory affairs. Cboe, Nasdaq, Tradeweb, Wedbush, and Phillip Capital.
• The thinkers and the press. Robin Hanson, the economist who was arguing for prediction markets before most of the room was born. Nate Silver. Good Judgment's CEO. Correspondents from CNBC, Fox Business, and Bloomberg.
• The lawyers. Latham, Cleary, Paul Hastings, Akin Gump, Katten, Cahill, Morgan Lewis, and a dozen more. When a conference has this many partners on stage, the rules are still being written.

That is not a fan convention. That is the industry's plumbing showing up in one place.

Why it's worth watching

Prediction markets had a breakout year. Volume that was measured in the low billions a couple of years ago is now measured in the tens of billions a month. Everyone in the building already believes the thing works. The harder question, the one PREDICT is built to argue about, is what has to happen for this to become a mature financial and information industry rather than a very good year.

The panels will cover it from every side: which court or statute settles the state-by-state sports fights, when hedging real business risk on an event contract stops being a press release and becomes routine, who provides liquidity when the headline markets go quiet, what the third big category is after sports and politics, and whether this is finance, gambling, forecasting, or media. The answer to that last one decides who regulates it, who trades it, and who covers it. I'll be listening for all of it.

But I'm not going to PREDICT to summarize panels. I'm going to collect predictions.

The predictions I want to hear

Betting the Future runs on one rule: if you're going to make a claim about the future, say it clearly enough that a market can settle it. So every question I ask at PREDICT has a live contract behind it. Anyone who answers can put money on their answer the same afternoon, and when the market resolves, we'll all know who was right.

Here is what I'll be asking speakers, attendees, and anyone who will stand still long enough. Prices are where the markets stood on September 6.

1. Who wins the midterms?

PREDICT is four weeks before Election Day. Kalshi and Polymarket both have the House at roughly 85 percent Democratic. The Senate is the interesting one: Kalshi has Republicans at 52 percent to hold it, and Polymarket has Democrats at 51 percent to take it. Two regulated markets, opposite favorites. I want to know which side of that coin the people who build these markets are on, and whether they'd trade it.

2. Which AI company has the best model at the end of 2026?

Kalshi's year-end market has Claude at 62 percent, ChatGPT at 25, Gemini at 6, and Grok at 5. The question resolves in under four months, which makes it a fast, clean test of whether this room, full of people who price uncertainty for a living, sees something the market doesn't.

3. Which platform is the biggest prediction market at the end of 2027?

Kalshi, Polymarket, or someone else. This is the question everyone at PREDICT has an opinion on and nobody has to defend, because there's no market on it yet. I'll define it by monthly notional volume in December 2027, as tracked by an independent source like the NEXT.io dashboard, and I'll log every answer. If a venue lists a contract on this before the year is out, I'll link it here and we'll see who was willing to back their call.

4. Your best call, and your worst.

One more, and it's the one I'm most looking forward to. I'll ask everyone for their favorite prediction market they got right, and the one they got hugely wrong. Not the position, the story: what they saw, what they missed, and what it cost. I've published my own zero-for-five. I want to hear theirs.

Every answer goes on the record with the name, the date, and the market price that day. When these questions settle, I'll publish the scoreboard. That is the whole point of the show.

Who should attend

If you're an investor, trader, market maker, platform operator, regulator, attorney, researcher, or a journalist who covers this space, PREDICT looks like an unusually dense two days. You will not find more of the people who set the rules and provide the liquidity in one room this fall. Founders will find a strong room too, though the second conference I'm covering this month is built more specifically for them.

Tickets are $1,695 for a single seat, $1,495 each for groups of three or more, and $895 for students and startups without institutional funding. Credentialed journalists can apply for a free press pass.

Meet Betting the Future at PREDICT

I'll be in the room both days with a camera and the questions above. If you're an investor, trader, researcher, founder, or regulator willing to make a prediction on the record, on a question with a live market behind it, I want to talk to you. Some of those conversations will become episodes. All of them will be logged.

Send me a DM on X or LinkedIn and we'll find a time at the Marriott Marquis.

I will see you in the future. Or in Times Square, whichever comes first.

Betting the Future is attending PREDICT as an independent media guest. This is not a paid placement. Market prices are as of September 6, 2026. Not financial advice. Prediction market contracts involve risk of total loss.