On Friday, October 9, The Wall Street Journal reported that Kalshi is investigating trades placed on Katie Zacharia becoming White House press secretary before the news was public.
That day we rebuilt every trade in the market from Kalshi’s public data and shared it with the Journal. The Journal’s Brian Schwartz posted our figures that evening:
What we found
$1,388 bought about 20,000 YES contracts before any news. Between 7:47 PM Thursday and 2:00 PM Friday there were 78 trades. A buyer betting on Zacharia started every one of them. If she got the job, those contracts paid about $20,000.
The price went from 1¢ to 45¢ before the first report. For five weeks Zacharia never traded above 4¢. The New York Times story went live at 2:00:28 PM Friday. By 1:56 PM she was already at 45¢.
Red bars are YES buying before the 2:00 PM story. Source: Kalshi public trade data.
The three reported bets are really two orders. The $19, $74 and $80 figures in early coverage are pieces of larger orders.
The $19 bet is one slice of a Thursday 10:43 PM order that pays about $4,332. The $74 and $80 bets are slices of a single order placed at 1:41:25 PM Friday: exactly 10,000 contracts for exactly $200.00, paying $10,000, 19 minutes before the story broke.
Only one name moved. In a market where exactly one candidate wins, the favorites Anna Kelly and Scott Jennings held their prices while Zacharia climbed alone.
A rumor spreading through the crowd usually pulls money off of front-runners.
That does not seem to be the case here.
The key numbers. Source: Kalshi public trade data, BETINT analysis.
Every pre-news buyer is anonymous on Kalshi, so only Kalshi can say who placed these orders. Our brief documents timing and size. It does not allege wrongdoing by any person.
This is the work BETINT technology is running 24/7 every day: watch prediction markets at the trade level, find the moves that come before the news, and turn the raw tape into numbers a newsroom can use. If you cover markets, politics or regulation and want the trade-level data behind a story, reach out to us at BETINT.
BETINT Brief BI-20261009-KZC. All times Eastern.