(Pew Research Center illustration; photos via Getty Images)

Prediction markets are an increasingly popular way for people to trade on the outcomes of real-world events. As of April, monthly trading volume on the two largest prediction markets – Polymarket and Kalshi – had reached nearly $24 billion.

To better understand how ordinary people use prediction markets, we collected a sample of nearly 12,000 Polymarket accounts that placed trades on 10 specific high-volume events in early 2026. We then analyzed their publicly available trading activity over the six-week period from May 7 to June 19. Here’s what we found.

About this research

This Pew Research Center analysis looks at prediction market trading behavior on Polymarket from May 7 to June 19, 2026.

Why did we do this?

Pew Research Center does research to help the public, media and decision-makers understand important topics. This research builds on our recent work on gambling and the broader prediction economy – including trading on prediction markets, public attitudes toward sports betting and views on the morality of gambling around the world.

Learn more about Pew Research Center.

How did we do this?

Data on Polymarket users primarily comes from the Polymarket user activity API, which does not include the company’s newer U.S. platform. Kalshi, the other major prediction market platform, does not make this kind of user data available.

We collected trading activity by sampling Polymarket user “wallets” in early May 2026. We first used other Polymarket API endpoints to identify 10 high-volume trading events across a range of topics, collecting the 4,000 most recent trades per event. We used the 16,836 accounts that placed those trades as our sample. We refer to these accounts as “traders” or “users” throughout, though some individuals may run multiple accounts.

We then collected activity for those accounts 15 times between May 7 and June 19, 2026. This process yielded activity for 11,989 active wallets. The API allowed us to collect the 4,000 most recent activities per account per collection using offset pagination. Only 2% of wallets hit this limit, meaning those accounts may have made trades during our analysis period that we did not collect.

To examine the topics that users were interested in, we also recorded the events that these accounts traded on during each data collection. We used Polymarket’s tags to sort events into broad categories, for instance nesting “basketball” under “sports.” Overall, 1% of events fell into multiple categories, while fewer than 1% could not be categorized.

Polymarket reports prices in USD Coin (USDC), a cryptocurrency pegged to the U.S. dollar at a stable 1:1 conversion rate.

How does the typical trader use Polymarket?

The typical (median) Polymarket user placed a total of 46 trades across 10 active trading days during our study period. The value of the average trade was $6.50.

However, there’s a lot of variation in trading activity on Polymarket. About a quarter of the accounts we analyzed (24%) placed fewer than 10 trades. On the other end of the spectrum, 11% of accounts placed 1,000 trades or more in just six weeks.

When it comes to wins and losses, the typical Polymarket user largely broke even during the six weeks we examined. The average trader spent a little over $600 on the site, with a net loss of less than $2. More than half of traders (58%) gained or lost less than $100.

But some traders had much bigger profits and losses: 7% had a net profit of more than $1,000 over this six-week period, while 9% lost a similar amount.

How does Polymarket trading behavior differ by topic area?

Polymarket offers a wide array of topics people can trade on. But sports, politics and cryptocurrency account for nearly all trading volume on the site.

The typical Polymarket user primarily trades on a single topic. In the period we examined, the median trader placed about three-quarters of their trades on one topic. About a quarter of users we analyzed (24%) only placed trades on one topic.

Polymarket users also behave differently depending on the topic they tend to focus on. Among users who placed at least 75% of their trades on a single topic:

• Sports traders were the most active, placing an average of 69 trades across 12 trading days during our analysis period – which notably overlapped with the NBA Finals, the World Cup and the Stanley Cup.
• Cryptocurrency traders placed an average of 59 trades on five active trading days.
• Politics traders were the least active, placing an average of 13 trades on seven trading days.

Traders who focus on sports also tended to make slightly larger trades: $9, on average, compared with $6 for those focused on politics and less than $4 for those focused on crypto.

How do the most active Polymarket users stand out?

The 11% of Polymarket users who made at least 1,000 trades during our analysis period stand out in several ways from less-frequent users:

• They make trades more regularly. On average, they made a trade on 39 of the 42 days in our study period. By comparison, the median user made a trade on 10 of 42 days.
• They often take more substantial losses. The typical highly active user lost around $140 over the study period. Overall, 33% of these users lost over $1,000 in these six weeks – more than the share (27%) who profited a similar amount. The average individual trade for these highly active users was around $6, similar to the typical user.

Kaitlyn Radde is a computational social science assistant at Pew Research Center.