IG Group chief executive Breon Corcoran questioned the economic meaning of the trading-volume records promoted by Kalshi and Polymarket, telling analysts that notional figures are hard to tie to economic value and that investors should judge the sector on net gaming revenue instead, Finance Magnates reported on Oct 12.
Corcoran spoke on Thursday at an investor seminar on Underdog, the US prediction-markets operator IG agreed in July to buy for up to 1.3 billion dollars, according to Finance Magnates. He said the two leading venues were "talking up their notional traded volume with great gusto," and gave the example of a 100-leg parlay where a 1 dollar stake can carry a notional value in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars.
The distinction matters because notional volume is the industry's headline metric, as Finance Magnates put it. Kalshi crossed 100 billion dollars in lifetime notional volume in June, helped by World Cup markets, Finance Magnates reported. Handle, the money customers actually stake, is closer to the terminology listed companies use, Corcoran said, and the key metric is net gaming revenue.
Underdog itself illustrated the point at the seminar. Co-founder and chief executive Jeremy Levine told attendees the company generated 105 million dollars of net revenue in the third quarter, up 118 percent from a year earlier, with handle per customer up 165 percent, according to Finance Magnates. IG's chief financial officer Clifford Abrahams said the upfront price of about 1.1 billion dollars was 2.4 times Underdog's net revenue for the 12 months to June.
The volume methodology debate has independent legs. TickerTracker reported that eight tracked prediction-market exchanges generated 7.64 billion dollars in notional volume over the September 19-20 weekend, up 20 percent from 6.34 billion dollars the prior weekend, with Kalshi accounting for 5.83 billion dollars, Gambling Insider reported on September 21. The same report noted that prediction-market contracts are generally counted at their 1 dollar face value regardless of the price paid, so low-priced contracts can generate substantially more reported volume than the capital actually committed.
Kalshi's figures have drawn sharper scrutiny still. CoinDesk found that 57 percent of sampled dollar volume in Kalshi's ether perpetual contract clustered within 2 dollars of a recurring 5,499 dollar trade size across 23 one-hour windows between September 17 and 20, ZeroHedge reported, while a pseudonymous quant's analysis of public order-book data put 24-hour volume at 174 times open interest in the same contract, a turnover ratio the platform's crypto chief publicly disputed as misreading the data.
Corcoran also noted that IG is currently the only public company talking about prediction-markets revenue, while Robinhood did so in the past: Robinhood earned 156 million dollars from event contracts in the second quarter, more than ten times the year-earlier figure, according to Finance Magnates. IG, which owns US brokerage tastytrade, expects the Underdog deal to close in late 2026 or early 2027, and said prediction markets and daily fantasy sports would make up 27 percent of combined group revenue, with the US rising to 41 percent from 19 percent.
Analysis: Corcoran is doing two things at once. He is lowering the bar his own 1.3 billion dollar acquisition will be judged against by steering analysts toward net revenue, where Underdog's 105 million dollar quarter looks defensible, and he is planting a flag for the metrics war that will define the next funding round: Kalshi raised 1 billion dollars at a 22 billion dollar valuation in May on the back of notional records, according to Finance Magnates, and the first public-company buyer in the space just told the market those records do not price the business. Watch whether either venue publishes net revenue or fee figures in response, because the side that defines the yardstick usually wins the valuation argument.