$200,000 annual salary hiring, Wall Street enters prediction markets

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Author: Nusk, Deep潮 TechFlow Finally arrives. The prediction markets once built by political supporters, speculative retail investors, and wool parties are now welcoming a silent yet deadly new wave of players.

According to the Financial Times on Thursday, several well-known trading firms including DRW, Susquehanna, and Tyr Capital are forming dedicated prediction market trading teams.

Last week, DRW posted a job listing offering up to $200,000 base annual salary for traders capable of “monitoring and trading active markets in real-time” on platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi.

The options trading giant Susquehanna is hiring prediction market traders who can “detect mispricings,” identify “abnormal behaviors” and “inefficiencies” in prediction markets, while also building a dedicated sports trading team.

Crypto hedge fund Tyr Capital continues to recruit prediction market traders with “experience in running complex strategies.”

Data supports this expansion ambition.

Monthly trading volume surged from less than $100 million at the start of 2024 to over $8 billion by December 2025, with a record single-day trading volume of $701.7 million on January 12.

When the pool of funds becomes deep enough to support giants’ scale, Wall Street’s entry becomes inevitable.

Arbitrage First

In prediction markets, institutions and retail traders are essentially playing different games.

Retail traders often rely on fragmented information to predict individual events, which is fundamentally a form of gambling, while institutional players focus on cross-platform arbitrage and market structural opportunities.

In October 2025, Boaz Weinstein, founder of hedge fund Saba Capital Management, stated at a closed-door meeting that prediction markets can allow portfolio managers to hedge investments with greater precision, especially regarding the probabilities of specific events.

He stood next to Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan and said, “A few months ago, Polymarket showed a 50% chance of recession, while the credit market indicated only about 2% risk. You can come up with countless pairs of trades that were previously impossible.”

According to Weinstein, hedge fund managers can buy contracts on Polymarket that say “the economy will not recession,” because the market perceives a 50% chance of recession, making this contract relatively cheap.

Meanwhile, they can short bonds or credit products that would plummet during a recession, since the credit market only assigns a 2% probability to recession, meaning these products are still priced high.

If the economy actually enters a recession, you might lose a little on Polymarket, but make a big profit in the credit market because those overvalued bonds would crash.

If the economy doesn’t recession, you profit on Polymarket, and might lose a little in the credit market, but overall still profit.

The emergence of prediction markets provides a brand-new “price discovery tool” for traditional financial markets.

The Privileged Class Arrives

What tilts the balance even more is the privilege at the rule level.

Susquehanna is Kalshi’s first market maker and has reached a contract agreement with Robinhood.

Kalshi offers many benefits to market makers: lower fees, special trading limits, and more convenient trading channels, though specific terms are not publicly disclosed.

The entry of market makers will quickly change this market.

Previously, prediction markets often suffered from liquidity shortages, especially for niche events. When you want to buy or sell large amounts of contracts, you might face wide spreads or find no counterparties at all.

Professional institutions will rapidly eliminate obvious mispricings. For example, price differences for the same event across different platforms, or obviously unreasonable probability pricing, will be quickly smoothed out.

This is not good news for retail traders. Previously, you could find arbitrage opportunities, such as “Trump winning” at 60% probability on Polymarket and 55% on Kalshi. Such opportunities will likely disappear in the future.

With PhDs earning hundreds of thousands of dollars on Wall Street leading the way, prediction contracts may also enter an era of specialization and diversification, beyond just single-event predictions, such as:

1. Multi-event combination contracts, similar to parlay sports betting

2. Time series contracts, predicting the probability of an event occurring within a specific timeframe

3. Conditional probability products, such as “what is the probability B occurs given A occurs”

……

Looking back at financial history, from forex to futures, and then to cryptocurrencies, each emerging market develops along a similar trajectory: retail traders ignite the spark, ultimately taken over by institutions.

Prediction markets are repeating this process. Technical advantages, capital scale, and privileged access will ultimately determine who can stay till the end in this game of probabilities.

For retail traders, although there may still be a glimmer of hope in long-term predictions or niche fields, they must face reality: once Wall Street’s sophisticated machinery starts operating at full speed, the era of easy profits from informational advantages may be gone for good.