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6 Ways to Make Money in Prediction Markets in 2026
Prediction markets are growing fast. Most participants are still trading for fun. Here’s how professionals extract probability, time decay, and structural edge instead.
Juan Aranovich
January 09, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes
Good Friday! I’m Juan Aranovich, managing editor of Unchained, economist, and crypto investor.
Today, my eyes are on strategies to make money with prediction markets.
The sector is booming, but efficiency is lagging.
Below, I’ll explain how you could turn that gap into opportunity, with clear guides and examples.
6 Ways to Make Money in Prediction Markets in 2026
Prediction markets are finally big enough to matter and still inefficient enough to exploit.
That combination does not last very long.
Retail participation is accelerating. Platforms such as Polymarket and Kalshi are raising billions at unicorn-level valuations.
Volumes are sticking, even when crypto cools off. And most users still treat these markets like sports betting with better graphics.
Just look at Polymarket’s growth in 2025, even after people said it would die after the U.S. Presidential elections:
While most people think that to make money in prediction markets you need to have an edge on insider information, professionals treat them very differently.
And that’s what we’ll go over today: how to make money without betting on the outcome.
When Markus Thielen, head of 10x Research, talks about prediction markets, he does not talk about being right or having an informational advantage. He talks about probability, time decay, order flow, and structural mispricing.
In other words, he talks about the same edges that showed up in early crypto derivatives, GBTC, MicroStrategy basis trades, and every other venue where retail urgency met institutional patience.
And if you don’t know what these mean, don’t worry. All you need to know is that these moves printed big bucks for the investors who knew how to play them.
Prediction markets are simply the next arena.
In the rest of this piece, you will find:
The exact strategies that you could use and how each one actually works in practice
REAL examples that you could trade literally today
Why most profits come from boring trades, not bold predictions
Where retail consistently loses money and why
How to think about prediction markets like a trading desk, not a pundit
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