State of the Lab — week ending Sep 13, 2026

This week the lab ran 2 seats across 1 desk and settled 480 trades, every one of them real money. Best seat: Live · crypto 15-min, book B. Roughest seat: Live · WTI 15-min.

Last week this issue said the next two hundred orders would decide which
window was the accident. They did not decide it. They said something more
useful, which is that the answer depends on size.

Book B ran its second window at one contract a fill and passed again: 217
fills, plus 3.60 cents a contract, up 7 dollars and 57 cents. Pooled with
the first window that is 415 fills at plus 4.68 cents, every one of six
days positive. So it took the first step on its ladder and doubled to two
contracts a fill. That window failed. It lost 5 dollars and 31 cents over
279 contracts, minus 1.90 cents each, and was stopped after 181 of its 250
orders because its pass mark could no longer be reached. The orders filled
just as often and just as completely as before. What changed was how often
the favourite lost: 85 percent winners instead of 90. When you pay around
85 cents for a contract, those five points are the entire edge. Two days
cannot say whether size caused that or whether the edge simply went quiet
while size happened to be up.

So the ladder stepped back down to ask the only question that matters
first: is it still there at one contract? That window started on
Thursday and has settled 124 fills at plus 3.04 cents a contract, 111 of
them winners. The first half of those fills made 7.98 cents a contract and
the second half lost 1.81. The pass mark, written down before it began,
needs 150 settled fills, a positive total, and both halves agreeing. Today
it has one of the three. If it fails at one contract the lane closes. No
new settings and no new markets.

The oil lane closed itself on Friday night. Once it reached 150 orders its
stopping rule asked whether both halves of the sample told the same
story. They did not: the first half lost 0.32 cents an order and the
second half made 2.03. It finishes up 1 dollar and 30 cents over 152
contracts, which is indistinguishable from nothing, and a lane that cannot
tell you whether it works is not one to keep feeding.

We also owe a correction. Last week said the paper desks were coming back.
They are not coming back as they were. The whale grid, the paper maker
books, weather, esports and the hourly crypto seats are retired, and their
records stay on the board exactly as they finished. In their place are
three narrow paper lanes, each one question with its pass mark set before
the first order. The first puts book B's favourite rule on the hourly
Bitcoin, Ether, XRP and Solana strikes, because a pass through the public
trade history found the same edge there on far more volume than the
fifteen minute markets carry. It needs 150 paper fills, a positive result
counting only fills where a real trade printed through our price, halves
that agree, and no single day carrying more than 40 percent of the total.
It had 35 paper fills after its first day. The other two try the same idea on Trump
speech mention markets and on Rotten Tomatoes score markets, with verdicts
due in late September and early October.

The rest of the week went into looking rather than trading. We graded
every open market on the exchange from public data, 137,294 of them
across 4,183 series. Most of the volume is sports and a single Fed
decision market, and of the 1,088 series trading more than a thousand
contracts a day, 998 charge makers nothing. And a football comparison is
now running in the background: on every game we could match so far,
Kalshi's pregame price sits within about a cent of the sharp sportsbook
line with the bookmaker's margin removed. That verdict is due in late
October.

The lab is now one live lane, three paper questions and a football
comparison. It is the smallest it has ever been, and that is on purpose.

Each desk name links to The Seats, which gives every strategy's real trigger and threshold plus the Kalshi tickers it trades, enough to run any of them yourself. The one exception is market making: which markets it quotes is listed, how it quotes them is not, and the About page explains why.

All 158 seats behind these five lines, with win rates, fee drag, all-time results and the per-trade CSV, are in the members edition. 10 seats retired to date; their records stay on the board.

The market-making seats are simulated fills, and a simulation cannot model adverse selection: the tendency of a resting order to be taken exactly when someone better informed wants the other side. Where this lab has run the same strategy with real money, the live result has come in materially below the paper one. Read the maker desk as an upper bound on what the idea could earn, not as what it would have earned. The live desk below it is that check running in public: same ideas, one contract at a time, settled by the exchange.

Fill verification: 480 of 480 trades (100%) were checked against real order-book depth.

The rest are entered at the ask the exchange reported, but the lab does not record the book for every market. Challenger tennis, MLB, soccer, basketball and football have no depth archive, so those fills cannot be re-checked after the fact. Trades whose price level had no size behind it are discarded, not counted.

The archive. The lab records and permanently keeps the raw market data behind every number it publishes: trade tape from 2026-08-15 (27 days); order book depth from 2026-07-28 (46 days); top of book ticks from 2026-07-27 (47 days); 15-minute market quotes from 2026-07-21 (53 days). 3.4 GB and growing nightly. None of it can be recreated after the fact, which is why it gets recorded. It stays in the lab: the exchange reserves its own market data and this lab does not pass it on. What gets published is what the lab finds in it.

Every trade above was logged live, then sealed: each night the lab hashes its raw market archive and trade ledgers into an append-only chain. Rewriting any past trade would change every head after it, so check this one against last week's issue.

Chain head as of 2026-09-12T04:18Z: a8ca2c84243b48690a62e0f4b49d81b8a48f26d056ce50f2c31b1bb6ef4bc3de