Comment Text:
I am a fast food worker from Fresno, California. I make around $20 an hour. I am submitting this comment because the Commission is asking the public what it should consider in regulating prediction markets, and I want the Commission to understand what these markets look like from where I sit — not from a trading desk, not from a law firm, but from a person who was targeted by Kalshi's advertisements while scrolling my phone on a lunch break and who lost $2,400 I could not afford to lose.
I will try to answer the Commission's specific questions as best I can. I think my answers matter as much as anyone else's.
On Whether These Contracts Serve a Public Interest (Questions 7–11)
The Commission asks what role event contracts play in "managing and assuming price risks" and whether they serve the public interests described in the CEA.
I have no price risk to manage. I have no commercial exposure to whether a named senator wins reelection or whether the Fed raises rates by a quarter point. Neither does anyone I know. When Kalshi advertised to me, it did not advertise hedging. It advertised winning. It advertised being right. It advertised the feeling of turning knowledge into money.
That is not price discovery. That is not risk management. That is gambling, marketed to working people who have very little financial cushion and very little protection when things go wrong. The CEA's public interest standard exists precisely to prevent the Commission from licensing products that harm the public while providing no offsetting economic benefit. Kalshi's retail contracts fail that standard completely.
On Gaming and the Public Interest (Question 19)
The Commission asks what factors should define "gaming" under CEA section 5c(c)(5)(C) and whether characteristics like entertainment purpose or an element of chance are relevant.
I can answer this from experience. When I used Kalshi, I was not hedging anything. I was not price-discovering anything. I was entertained by the feeling of having a stake in news events, and I was chasing losses when things went wrong. That is the definition of recreational gambling. The element of chance was total — I had no more genuine informational edge on whether inflation would hit a specific number than I do on which team wins on Sunday.
The Commission asks in question 19(d) whether it should consider that prediction market participants tend to be younger and less financially experienced than participants in traditional derivatives markets. The answer is yes — and the Commission should weight this heavily. I am 26. I found Kalshi on TikTok. I did not understand that I was trading an unregulated gambling product with no loss limits and no consumer protections. I understood that I was doing something that felt smarter than going to a casino, because Kalshi's marketing told me it was.
That framing — sophisticated, analytical, financial — is what makes prediction markets more dangerous than ordinary gambling, not less. It disarms the instinct that would otherwise tell a person like me to be careful.
On Abusive Practices and Consumer Protection (Question 2a, 2b, 11)
The Commission asks about abusive trading practices, access fairness, and what factors should inform consumer protection requirements for prediction markets.
Here is the abusive practice I experienced: frictionless deposits, psychologically engineered loss-chasing interfaces, and no guardrails of any kind. Kalshi made it trivially easy to add money and designed its platform so that each loss felt like a near-miss that the next trade could correct. There were no deposit limits. No cooling-off periods. No pop-up telling me I had lost $500 in an hour. Nothing that any responsible gambling operator in California — where sports betting remains tightly regulated — would be permitted to omit.
The Commission's Core Principle 2 requires DCMs to prohibit abusive practices. A platform designed by behavioral psychologists to maximize deposit frequency and minimize withdrawal behavior among retail participants who cannot afford their losses is an abusive practice. The Commission should say so explicitly and enforce accordingly.
On Manipulation and Inside Information (Questions 29–32)
The Commission asks whether prediction markets are susceptible to manipulation and how it should address the risk of insider trading by participants with asymmetric information.
From where I stand, this question answers itself. I had no inside information. I had a phone and a lunch break. The people on the other side of my trades — the large accounts, the politically connected, the people with genuine informational advantages about the outcomes I was betting on — did. The Commission acknowledges this asymmetry in its own questions. It should acknowledge the conclusion that follows: a market structurally designed to transfer money from uninformed retail participants to informed insiders is not a legitimate derivatives market. It is extraction.
The Commission has brought zero enforcement actions for insider trading on political prediction markets despite the obvious and documented presence of traders with material nonpublic information about political outcomes. That enforcement vacuum is not neutral. It is a policy choice that benefits sophisticated insiders at the expense of people like me. The Commission should reverse it.
On Self-Certification (Questions 23–27)
The Commission asks about the procedural aspects of the listing process and whether the current framework is adequate.
I did not know that the contracts I was trading were approved through a process where Kalshi certified its own compliance with one business day's notice to the Commission. I assumed that a government-licensed exchange had been meaningfully reviewed by someone whose job was to protect me. That assumption was wrong, and Kalshi's marketing encouraged it — the CFTC designation was prominently displayed as a trust signal while the platform operated with no consumer protections whatsoever.
Self-certification is not regulation. It is a permission slip that companies write for themselves. For products offered to retail participants with no financial sophistication and no protection against catastrophic loss, one business day's self-certified notice to a regulator is not adequate. It is a gap that Kalshi has built an entire business inside of.
On Costs and Benefits (Questions 6, 14, 22, 38)
The Commission asks about cost-benefit considerations throughout this ANPRM.
Here is the cost-benefit analysis from my perspective. I lost $2,400 — roughly five weeks of take-home pay. That money did not circulate back into the Fresno economy. It did not go toward rent, food, or my little sister's birthday. It went to Kalshi. The benefit I received was nothing. I did not hedge any risk. I did not contribute to price discovery that served any social purpose. I was a retail participant in a gambling market that had no obligation to protect me, and I paid for that absence of protection with money I needed.
Multiply that by the millions of retail participants Kalshi has acquired through aggressive social media marketing aimed at young, working, and financially inexperienced Americans, and the cost-benefit analysis is not complicated. The costs are borne by the people least able to absorb them. The benefits accrue to Kalshi's investors and to sophisticated counterparties on the other side of retail trades. That is not a public interest. That is a transfer.
What the Commission Should Do
I am not an economist or a lawyer. But I can read the Commission's own questions and recognize that they already contain the answers.
The Commission asks whether event contracts involving gaming are contrary to the public interest. Kalshi's retail contracts are gaming. The answer is yes.
The Commission asks whether self-certification is adequate for novel retail-facing products. It is not. The answer is mandatory prior approval with real public interest review.
The Commission asks whether it should consider responsible gambling standards. It should require them immediately as a condition of continued DCM registration — deposit limits, loss alerts, self-exclusion, advertising restrictions targeting young people, and problem gambling funding.
And the Commission should revoke Kalshi's DCM designation. A company that built its business by using federal registration to evade state consumer protection laws, that markets gambling to working people on TikTok and calls it finance, and that has operated for years with no meaningful regulatory constraint has not earned the privilege of a government license.
I am asking the Commission to protect people like me. Not after another rulemaking cycle. Now.
