Did writing about prediction markets on a daily basis for months on end ruin my year? Not quite, but it got pretty close at times.
You get used to going where the news takes you as a gambling industry journalist. Although, if we’re playing this game by Kalshi’s rules, we should probably start calling ourselves financial derivatives trading and truth machine reporters. It’s not gambling, folks! Don’t make them tap the sign.
Anyway, following the news is not even part of the job but the very name of the game. You want to learn new things, of course you do, and it makes you better at your job. The prediction markets beat has been a learning curve unlike most. For this non-American who only started writing about the U.S. side of the gambling industry two years ago, the nuances of the patchwork market and the state-by-state laws and regulations and politics already required a brain like a sponge and a fair whack of commitment and patience to get anywhere close to mastering.
Throw into the mix suddenly needing to learn the differences between designated contract markets, futures commission merchants, derivatives clearing organizations and introducing brokers, and you have yourself essentially a whole new job. It’s been interesting, there’s no doubting that. It’s just not necessarily what I had planned when I hit “apply” on that SBC Americas Senior Business Journalist application. The sheer volume and pace of the sports betting-meets-event contracts news cycle was not what I envisioned at the end of 2024 would be my daily reality by late 2025.
But things move fast, so you must learn fast. There’s still a lot of learning to go for all of us involved with covering this gambling-adjacent industry. (Is the “adjacent” qualifier even necessary these days?) Knowing where to draw the line on coverage has been tough, too. This is primarily a casino and sports gambling news site; now that they are offering what equates quite clearly to sports gambling, should we be treating Kalshi, Polymarket, Crypto.com and the rest in the same way we treat DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM and the rest in terms of quantity and breadth of coverage? Kalshi launching college betting markets is clearly within our remit, but what about these companies’ hires, partnerships, public comments? This is something that every gambling reporter has to wrestle with for 2026.
A panelist at the NCLGS Winter Meeting in December called prediction markets “the most exciting thing in gaming,” even if his job title as a tribal casino CEO made him fundamentally opposed. Love it or hate it, I would agree. Even the one time (yes, just one) that I told my editor that I hated the story that I was researching at the time, I’m pleased that I researched it and wrote it. And a shout-out to the various people who helped to educate me on this topic and to inform my writing and talking on the subject, whether they did it directly or indirectly or knowingly or unknowingly. They are too many to name, ranging from editors to newsletter writers to financial experts to PR folks and my fellow industry writers.
Let’s do it again in 2026. We can hardly stop now, can we?
